Merchandising Planning Manager 

San Mateo, CA (Collab)

As the Merchandising Planning Manager, you will be part of the PlayStation Store team responsible for showcasing the incredible range of gameplay experiences on the PlayStation Store to over 100 million loyal gamers. You will build bridges between the cross functional teams at PlayStation to build a long-range merchandising and editorial plan, as well as monthly plans. Similarly, you will prepare retrospectives on execution of the plan to date and continue to iterate to ensure the highest priority elements are delivered by the team.  

You will leverage your deep expertise in digital, merchandising and commerce to understand and communicate the highest priorities across the teams, and drive alignment on our biggest bets in each market. As we develop editorial plans, you will partner closely with the editorial team to plan editorial support around key moments, further integrating activity with other business lines across the business. 

You will coordinate merchandising efforts across numerous touchpoints, including Live Services, Game Launches, Events, promotions and seasonal moments. Your analytical and creative thinking will help you identify bottlenecks and opportunities, ensuring we are maximizing short-term Store priorities, as well as building longer term user engagement.  

You will be accountable for creating and communicating a cohesive merchandising approach and priority support plans across omnichannel touchpoints, including console, app, and web storefronts. Your hands-on approach will involve a significant amount of stakeholder alignment, and trade-offs, as well as the ability to adapt plans as business needs change. You will be working cross functionally to optimize performance, ensuring team efforts are tied to well-defined goals and KPIs to drive commercial growth. Highly collaborative, you will partner with stakeholders across the Business and Product Teams to develop a world-class player experience.  

What you’ll be doing: 

• Develop & Deliver a joint Merchandising and Editorial Plan: Lead the creation and maintenance of a clear, visually structured Merchandising and Editorial Plan that integrates the diverse priorities of cross-functional teams. The plan will be designed for easy consultation by all stakeholders—ensuring transparency, alignment, and adaptability—while fostering a unified strategy to maximize incremental revenue, drive commercial growth, and enhance player satisfaction. 

• Act as the key liaison between the DGM Planning team and regional stakeholders, distilling the Global Priority Sheet into a cohesive, visual merchandising plan that integrates planned store campaigns and initiatives from PS Direct, Payments, Media/Marketing, CLV, Commercial Development, and Experimentation teams as well as the strategic input from Content Optimisation and Personalisation, ensuring alignment, visibility, and execution across all functions. 

• Collaborate Across Teams: Collaborate with teams across the business, including the Store, D2C, Business and Product Teams, to build strong relationships and to deliver against insights, plans, and recommendations. Ensure all plans align with brand and marketing guidelines. Work with Matrix teams to foster a collaborative gl/ocal hybrid culture that encourages and supports high performance, creativity, innovation and data led decision making.  Given the nature of the role, this will be of critical importance. 

• Merchandising and Editorial Plan Operational Delivery: in the short term, this will involve identifying how to integrate data from disparate teams and data sources into a cohesive plan. In the longer term, this will include building a proposal and tooling solutions to automate this work with minimal manual input. Fruther ensure that the plan provides clear and timely directions to operational teams so they can efficiently build store campaigns that drive impactful commercial results, aligned with Store Strategy and Mid-Range Plans.  

• Foster Continuous Improvement: responsible for developing plans in collaboration with Store and matrix teams and further supporting the development of an integrated team strategy that build short term wins, while focusing on strategic long-term investments and improvement. You will work closely with Store teams to stay abreast of commercial priorities and further understand how players are responding to commercial executions and campaigns.  

• Merchandising Project Management: given the highly cross functional nature of this role, with the need to stay abreast of numerous other team inputs, project management will be a core part of the role, helping to identify, track and measure the short and long-term plan for the merchandising and editorial priorities of the business.  

• Scope Design Requirements: collaboratively working with business and product stakeholders to define future systems requirements to improve merchandising effectiveness that support an integrated approach to building, measuring and planning inputs from a variety of teams across the system. This includes support building an automated planning system, able to notify operational teams dynamically of any changes or cancellations to plans.  

• Evaluate and Report Results: Work with teams to evaluate results of joint plans, assess impact across a variety of business and player metrics, and prepare insights and reports to improve future plans. Produce actionable insights and data-backed recommendations.   

• Develop Best Practices: Develop Merchandising and Editorial best practices and act as a subject matter expert on across the business for what’s happening on the store in the short and long term. Share knowledge and insights with the wider business and mentor team members where appropriate.  

• Understand Industry Trends: Stay abreast of trends and best practices in digital commerce, merchandising and editorial. Keep up to date with emerging industry trends, and best practices to bring fresh, innovative ideas to the business. Attend industry events to stay current with evolving methodologies.  

What we’re looking for: 

• The ideal candidate will have planning experience from similar roles, a passion for understanding customers and strong commercial instincts supported with a demonstrable experience of prioritizing activities to drive growth.  

• Proven track record of delivering and building long-range plans, and ensuring stakeholder buy in.   

• Exceptional interpersonal skills, with the ability to work collaboratively in a g/local hybrid environment. An ability to lead across multiple levels in an organisation and communicate with large groups of colleagues and senior stakeholders effectively.   

• Experience of developing and delivering complex programmes in a scaled business.   

• Strong project management experience in similar roles, with the ability to juggle numerous competing programs and priorities. 

• Adept at using data and analytics to develop a deep understanding of customer trends, with experience of creating programmes of work to continuously optimise and improve customer interfaces and experiences.  

• Strong data and analysis skills and comfort using analytics tools to understand and synthesize results and identify commercial opportunities.   

• Familiarity with building and scoping tooling solutions for digital commerce and planning.  

• Experience working with project management tools, ideally Wrike (or similar) 

• Exemplifies a systematic, disciplined and logical approach to problem solving.  

• Extensive experience of working in a direct-to-consumer digital or e-commerce business, in either the Retail, FMCG, Media or Tech verticals. A passion for the games industry and gaming is desired.  

• Exceptional interpersonal skills, with the ability to work collaboratively in a g/local hybrid environment. An ability to lead across multiple levels in an organisation and communicate with large groups of colleagues and senior stakeholders effectively.   

• Experience of working collaboratively across sales, marketing and insight teams to develop and deliver programmes of work and further comfort in working with Product and Engineering Teams to propose product and functionality enhancements.   

• Experience and comfort of delivering in a high energy, fast paced and changing environment. 

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