Accountabilities

Stage Gate Governance & Decision Discipline

Design, operate, and continuously improve the enterprise Stage Gate governance framework in partnership with the executive owner.

Establish gate criteria, required evidence, decision rights, and escalation pathways.

Lead effective gate reviews focused on readiness and decisions rather than routine status reporting.

Document approvals, conditions, accountable owners, and formal gate closure.

Maintain concise decision records covering supporting evidence, approvals, open and resolved decisions, exceptions, and ownership; ensure conditional approvals are followed through to completion.

Define which decisions become locked at each gate and establish controls for material changes after approval.

Apply proportionate gate requirements to product variants, new flavors, packaging sizes, and claims changes according to risk and complexity.

Identify decisions requiring executive intervention, present options and trade-offs, and recommend appropriate next steps.

Cross-Functional Planning & Execution

Integrate new product development plans across Product Development, Packaging, Procurement, Supply Chain, Quality, Regulatory, Finance, Marketing, Retail, Direct-to-Consumer (DTC), and International teams.

Establish critical-path plans, realistic functional lead times, dependencies, and clear handoffs.

Ensure relevant functions are engaged early, before downstream commitments are made.

Maintain integrated launch baselines and forecasts, making the timing, scope, resource, and risk implications of upstream delays clear to decision-makers.

Provide visibility into project status, timelines, risks, competing resource requirements, and launch-readiness decisions.

Partner with product and functional owners to resolve gaps while preserving their technical and commercial decision-making authority.

Commercialization Readiness

Coordinate requirements across formulation and claims decisions, packaging specifications and qualification, artwork and labeling, sourcing, master data, production, and channel launch activities.

Define readiness expectations for manufacturing, inventory, retailer execution, and DTC launches.

Ensure deviations from established readiness requirements are evaluated, documented, and explicitly approved.

Identify and communicate the schedule, cost, and execution implications of proposed late-stage changes.

Process Excellence & Adoption

Build on existing Stage Gate redesign work, including streamlined tasks, improved sequencing, and redesigned gate meetings, and operationalize improvements across active launches.

Simplify or eliminate duplicative and legacy requirements while preserving essential controls and decision quality.

Review briefs, approval points, and handoff documents to ensure each has a clear purpose, owner, and downstream user; retire redundant documentation.

Establish a reliable system of record for decisions, approved versions, deliverables, owners, milestones, and changes.

Develop a practical exception-management framework for retailer-specific requests and other deviations, including their incremental cost, capacity, and schedule implications.

Define and monitor process-effectiveness measures, such as on-time gate closure, changes to locked decisions, rework, and launch readiness.

Train teams, communicate process expectations, and drive consistent adoption across the organization.

Requirements

At least 10 years of experience in consumer packaged goods (CPG) new product development, innovation operations, commercialization, or related cross-functional leadership.

Experience in food, beverage, or nutritional products is strongly relevant.

Demonstrated ownership or substantial redesign of a formal Stage Gate or comparable new product development governance framework; participation in gate meetings alone is not sufficient.

Proven experience launching physical consumer products and understanding the interdependencies among formulation, regulatory and quality requirements, packaging, supply chain, manufacturing, and commercial execution.

How Jobgether works

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