Culinary Portfolio Manager, Cuisinart
Job ID 2023-01531
Description
Position Summary
Cuisinart is seeking a highly strategic and operationally strong Culinary Portfolio Manager to drive cross-category alignment, portfolio governance, and enterprise-level innovation execution.
This role ensures that strategy, financial planning, and execution discipline are aligned across all categories. The Culinary Portfolio Manager will partner closely with Product, Finance, Engineering, Marketing, and Global teams to bring rigor, clarity, and visibility to our portfolio strategy, investment decisions, and innovation processes.
This is a highly visible role with direct exposure to executive leadership and board-level materials.
Key Responsibilities
Portfolio Strategy, Financial Governance & Capital Allocation
- Architect the Enterprise Portfolio: Lead cross-category portfolio planning to ensure innovation investments ladder up to regional and global financial targets, growth platforms, and margin expansion goals.
- Drive Capital Allocation Discipline: Partner with Finance to govern innovation budgets, track investment performance, and optimize resource allocation across categories and geographies.
- Prioritize for Impact: Establish clear portfolio prioritization frameworks grounded in consumer impact, strategic fit, ROI thresholds, and capacity constraints.
- Own Portfolio-Level Financial Modeling: Build and maintain multi-year financial models evaluating revenue contribution, gross margin expansion, working capital impact, and capital deployment efficiency.
- Integrate Strategy into Planning Cycles: Embed portfolio governance into AOP, LRP, and QBR processes—ensuring pipeline health, risk visibility, and financial accountability are transparent to executive leadership.
Executive & Board Materials
- Develop executive-ready board decks and strategic presentations that clearly articulate portfolio performance, risks, and investment priorities.
- Synthesize complex product, financial, and operational inputs into clear narratives for senior leadership.
Process Excellence & Systems Leadership
- Resolve major cross-functional process gaps impacting speed, clarity, & accountability.
- Lead implementation / optimization of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems.
- Drive the Product/Stage Gate PMO framework and system implementation
Cross-Functional Integration
- Serve as liaison for collective Product Team interacting with other cross functional depts.
- Drive transparency across project timelines, interdependencies, and execution risks.
- Enable consistent communication across global teams.
What You’ll Drive
- A more disciplined portfolio prioritization model.
- Provide greater visibility and alignment between strategy, financial planning, and innovation execution.
- Clear governance structures and execution across PLM and PMO systems.
- Faster decision-making through improved executive reporting.
- Reduced process friction across categories and geographies.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in portfolio management, strategy, product management, or business operations (consumer products preferred).
- Strong financial acumen; comfort with P&L, margin modeling, and investment prioritization.
- Experience building executive-level presentations and board materials.
- Familiarity with PLM systems and stage-gate product development processes.
- Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives in matrixed organizations.
- Highly analytical, structured thinker with strong storytelling capability.
Leadership Profile
- Systems-oriented and process-minded, but pragmatic.
- Comfortable operating at both strategic and operational levels.
- Influences without authority and drives alignment across functions.
- Thrives in transformation environments.
- Balances rigor with speed.
Why This Role Matters
Cuisinart is entering a new chapter—evolving toward a consumer-led, innovation-driven organization with greater financial discipline and cross-functional clarity.
The Culinary Portfolio Manager will be a key architect of that transformation—ensuring our innovation investments are strategically prioritized, financially grounded, and operationally executable
Environmental Factors:
- Working conditions are normal for an office environment.
- Must be able to sit for extended periods of time.
- Must be able to use a computer keyboard and view a monitor for extended periods of time.
- This role requires Stamford, CT office on-site presence Monday through Thursday, with the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere on Fridays.
What we offer:
- Comprehensive Medical/Dental/Vision plans
- Generous Paid Time Off Programs
- Life & Disability Insurance
- FSA/HSA/Dependent Care FSA
- Paid Parental Leave
- 401k and company match
- EAP & Employee Wellness Programs
- Volunteer Days Paid Time Off
- Free breakfast and lunch in the Stamford office
About Conair:
Conair is a leading international designer, manufacturer, and marketer of branded personal care and small kitchen appliances, cookware, hairbrushes & accessories, cosmetic bags, and travel accessories.
Conair has always been driven by a passion for innovation; it’s part of the Company’s DNA. Trendsetting products have been invented by Conair since its inception in 1959, keeping the Company always a step ahead of the competition. The company's domestic and international divisions offer a diversified mix of consumer and professional products sold in over 120 countries. The Family of Conair brands include CONAIR, Cuisinart, Cuisinart Outdoors, BaBylissPro, Scünci , TRAVELSMART by CONAIR, and Waring.
Conair’s passion for innovation gets stronger with each decade, as evidenced by the over 1,000 patents the Company has obtained worldwide. Today, Conair and its brands are names known throughout the world. Conair continues to introduce its brands to new and emerging markets, year after year. By the 1990s, most households in America owned at least one Conair product. Today many have more than one, and the Company’s goal is to ensure that every household in the world eventually owns one of our products.
At Conair, we inspire our customers with innovative high-quality products and brands that enhance their lives.