New Ventures partners with internal stakeholders to identify, vet, and pilot innovative external solutions to business problems and explore future opportunities. Over the last 3 years, New Ventures has successfully executed 40 pilot projects and 10 of those projects were rolled out into the business. These projects have contributed significant revenue increase or major risk and cost reductions.In 2021, New Ventures is seeking a Principal Program Lead to support the growth in requests from Big Moves, Strategy Teams, and Departments for leadership, consulting, and access to test unique solutions from the startup ecosystem and new corporate vendors. New Ventures leads the application of cutting-edge solutions that have the potential to position Chick-fil-A as a disruptor, differentiate Chick-fil-A itself from competitors, and enable Chick-fil-A to care for our Operators, Team Members, and Customers in unprecedented ways.Due to the ground-breaking nature of the work, this role requires someone who is comfortable with transforming ambiguity into a project plan that a cross-functional team can follow and being able to use influence to align stakeholders. While guidance will be provided by the New Ventures team, it is essential that the person in this role is an exceptional self-starter and initiator.
Responsibilities:
- Contribute to continued growth of the Conduit and New Ventures inside Chick-fil-A and with external partners
- Understand NV business processes; adapt NV processes where needed to align with Chick-fil-A stakeholders
- Build and maintain global sourcing partnerships with organizations developing a portfolio of marketing-leading, disruptive technologies. (Startup accelerators/incubators, venture capital firms, corporate venture, etc.)
- Develop and maintain the NV internal stakeholder pipeline to ensure continued success of the organization
- Lead internal discussions to gather and refine stakeholder business use cases, be a partner with stakeholder, define IP issues and resolution, interact with Legal, DTT and other support organizations as needed
- Identify startups by working with sourcing partners and staying abreast of the industry players, understand and apply vetting criteria, coach startups responding to a Chick-fil-A use case
- Structure pilot legal agreements that permit agile, iterative, and measurable assessment of technology products/platforms and pressure testing of the vendor’s ability to adapt to Chick-fil-A’s business needs
- Negotiate pricing, service levels, etc. on behalf of the business stakeholders that would provide Chick-fil-A a competitive marketplace deal both in pilots as well as setting the groundwork for competitive enterprise pricing
- Design Startup Pilots and Rollouts per the NV Center of Excellence process, create KPIs, monitor metrics throughout pilot, while tracking priorities, timelines, and milestones
- Evaluate success of pilot in partnership with stakeholders and develop case studies to disseminate learnings
- Lead the development of roll out strategy with business stakeholders and other groups involved in operations
- Provide input to produce Status and Dashboard Reports, contribute to Executive–level reporting, weekly status reporting, project reporting
- Develop specialized expertise to add intellectual capital to CFA through applied research, stakeholder education and market monitoring.
- Research and contribute to Startup Database
Minimum Qualifications:Business Acumen
- Proven ability to define detailed business and/or functional requirements with internal stakeholders
- Contribute to robust interim reports, meet internal delivery and milestone dates, and present results to the team
- Proven financial acumen
- Experience with project management
- Results-oriented with a commitment to meeting deadlines
- Analytically minded: able to back up decisions with data and facts
- Ability to independently translate high-level goals into actionable, measurable plans
- Aptitude for organization and process implementation
- Strong work ethic, a definite team player attitude, with a deep commitment to customer satisfaction
- Attentiveness to detail with the ability to understand business context and find common ground
- Proven ability to influence decisions and drive change
- Demonstration of versatile learning with bias for continuous improvement
- Results-driven with the ability to work under pressure and through ambiguity
- Demonstrated ability to lead, as well as work on teams and collaborate across all levels
- Excellent personal, emotional, and relational intelligence
- Creative problem solver
- Apply excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to interact professionally with a diverse group of leadership managers and other subject matter experts
- Excellent team leadership skills
Applied Research
- Ability to tenaciously research new technologies and startups
- Effectively and efficiently utilize resources to gather semi- and public data; synthesize relevant information. Properly identify secondary tools appropriate for the specific project
Preferred Qualifications:
- Prior negotiating experience with technology vendors
- Experience driving thought leadership around technology adoption
- Experience with launching a company, a department or function, product, or community organization from “scratch”
- Experience leading multiple parallel projects with cross-functional teams
- Experience testing market-leading technology with KPIs to solve a business challenge within a corporate setting
- Experience scaling market-leading technology within a corporate setting
- Experience developing business relationships with Venture Capital firms and Startup Accelerators
- Experience piloting and co-developing with startups
- Experience negotiating IP requirements with vendors
- Understanding of retail operations, food and beverage, robotics, and logistics
- Proficiency with software such as Microsoft Project and the Office suite andSmartsheet and Slack
If interested, please apply here.
