Head of Customer and Marketing Technology

Company Description
Ralph Lauren Corporation (NYSE:RL) is a global leader in the design, marketing and distribution of premium lifestyle products in five categories: apparel, accessories, home, fragrances, and hospitality. For more than 50 years, Ralph Lauren's reputation and distinctive image have been consistently developed across an expanding number of products, brands and international markets. The Company's brand names, which include Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Collection, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, Polo Ralph Lauren, Double RL, Lauren Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren Children, Chaps, among others, constitute one of the world's most widely recognized families of consumer brands. At Ralph Lauren, we unite and inspire the communities within our company as well as those in which we serve by amplifying voices and perspectives to create a culture of belonging, ensuring inclusion, and fairness for all. We foster a culture of inclusion through: Talent, Education & Communication, Employee Groups and Celebration.

Position Overview
As the Head of Customer & Marketing Technology, you will lead the strategy and management of solutions that allow Ralph Lauren to connect with our customers in new and meaningful ways. This is a leadership role within the Global Analytics team that will bring together the needs of Marketing, Digital, Store Operations, Analytics, Compliance, and others to understand and engage with our customers. You will define and prioritize the architecture for our marketing technology stack and customer data architecture, and act as the Product Owner for our Customer Data Platform.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

• Partner with senior leaders across Marketing, Store Operations, Digital and other global lines of business to understand their customer data needs and translate those needs into features for delivery through an Agile development lifecycle. Act as a trusted advisor to promote new capabilities across the marketing technology stack. Prioritize investments in capabilities and data acquisition to create a roadmap and align with senior stakeholders.
• Lead the Marketing Technology architecture. Partner with leaders from across Marketing and Technology to define a comprehensive modern marketing technology architecture and roadmap including the Customer Data Platform, Personalization engines, Attribution, Web Analytics, Social Marketing, Digital Assess Management, etc. Understand industry direction and best practices. Create a unified view of architecture that encompasses technology, data, and people.
• Define the Customer Data Architecture. Understand and optimize the flow of customer data across the organization, and with outside partners. Define systems of record and reference for customer data, and integration patterns. Identify and connect internal and external sources of customer data.
• Act as the Product Owner for our Customer Data Platform. Own our global customer data platform including integration of new data sources and data consumers. Maintain and prioritize a backlog of features for implementation. Drive master data management capabilities including customer matching, data capture, and data quality. Define the data architecture for customer data. Structure data for operational, reporting, and analytical use cases. Ensure the highest quality, performance, delivery, and availability standards are met.
• Publish KPIs, reports, dashboards and models used for critical decision making. Reporting and analytics now drive decision making for all levels including corporate executives and retail store associates. Analytics are delivered in reports, dashboards, mobile applications, and direct alerts. Any disruption can impair decision making leading to loss of revenue. The leader must ensure the highest standards are upheld for publishing data across geographies and business units.
• Partner with Analytics and Operations teams, Integration team, and other stakeholders in IT and the business. Leverage strong collaboration skills to partner with varied stakeholders within the organization, including the analytics and enterprise data warehouse teams, business stakeholders, security, infrastructure, and other teams. Act as an evangelist for architecture and data governance best practices within IT and the business. Ensure that analytics applications can move rapidly through a development cycle that crosses the Analytics, Enterprise Delivery, and Operations teams.

Experience, Skills & Knowledge

• Experience with multiple components of the marketing technology stack including personalization, segmentation, campaign orchestration, salesforce marketing cloud, etc. is required.
• Strong Experience with Customer Data Platforms such as Redpoint, Adobe Experience Platform, Salesforce C360 or similar is required.
• Architecture experience in marketing technology or customer data
• Direct leadership of a cross functional team
• Knowledge of modern enterprise integration patterns including event streaming, APIs, and ETL/ELT
• Deep Retail Industry knowledge or previous experience working in the business.
• Technical expertise in big data, data warehousing, analytics, and data science related technologies including data lakes and machine learning
• Strong experience in working with data science teams in refining and optimizing data science and machine learning models and algorithms, specifically with models common to marketing solutions and customer data (e.g. probabilistic modeling).
• Strong experience in working with data governance, data quality, and data security teams and specifically and privacy and security officers in moving data pipelines into production with appropriate data quality, governance and security standards and certification.
• Experienced in agile methodologies and capable of applying DevOps and increasingly DataOps principles to data pipelines to improve the communication, integration, reuse and automation of data flows between data managers and consumers across an organization
• Strong experience supporting and working with cross-functional teams in a dynamic business environment.
• Required to be highly creative and collaborative. An ideal candidate would be expected to collaborate with both the business and IT teams to define the business problem, refine the requirements, and design and develop data deliverables accordingly. The successful candidate will also be required to have regular discussions with data consumers on optimally refining the data pipelines developed in nonproduction environments and deploying them in production.
• Required to have the ability to interface with, and gain the respect of, stakeholders at all levels and roles within the company.
• Has good judgment, a sense of urgency and has demonstrated commitment to high standards of ethics, regulatory compliance, customer service and business integrity.