Director, Innovation & Commercialization Operations

Stage Gate Governance & Decision Discipline

• Design, operation, and evolution of the Stage Gate governance framework with the executive owner, including gate criteria, required evidence, decision rights, and escalation pathways.
• Lead high-quality gate reviews focused on decisions and readiness, not routine status updates; document approvals, conditions, owners, and formal closure.
• Maintain a concise gate decision record covering evidence, approvals, conditions, decisions locked or left open, exceptions, and accountable owners; follow conditional approvals through closure.
• Develop and maintain practical standards for decisions that become locked at each gate, including clear controls for material changes after approval.
• Apply proportionate gate requirements for product variants, new flavors, pack sizes, and claims changes, based on risk and complexity rather than a one-size-fits-all process.
• Identify decisions requiring executive intervention, frame options and trade-offs, and recommend an appropriate path forward.

Cross-functional Planning & Execution

• Integrate NPD plans across Product Development, Packaging, Procurement, Supply Chain, Quality, Regulatory, Finance, Marketing, Retail, DTC, and International.
• Establish critical-path plans, realistic functional lead times, dependencies, and clean handoffs; ensure early functional engagement before downstream commitments are made.
• Maintain integrated launch baselines and forecasts; when upstream milestones slip, make the impacts on timing, scope, resources, and risk explicit for the accountable decision-maker.
• Provide visibility into project status, timing, risks, competing resource demands, and launch-readiness decisions.
• Partner with accountable product and functional owners to resolve gaps without displacing their technical or commercial decision authority.

Commercialization Readiness

• Coordinate upstream-to-downstream requirements across formula and claims decisions, packaging specifications and qualification, artwork and labels, sourcing, master data, production, and channel launch activities.
• Define clear readiness expectations for manufacturing, inventory, retailer execution, and DTC launch; ensure deviations are explicitly evaluated and approved.
• Surface the timing, cost, and execution impacts of proposed late changes.

Process Excellence & Adoption

• Build on AG1’s recent Stage Gate redesign work, including streamlined tasks, improved sequencing and redesigned gate meetings, and operationalize changes across active launches.
• Simplify or eliminate duplicative and legacy requirements while protecting critical controls and decision quality.
• Review briefs, approval points, and handoff artifacts to ensure each has a clear purpose, owner, and downstream user; retire redundant documentation.
• Create a reliable system of record for current decisions, approved versions, deliverables, owners, milestones, and changes.
• Establish a practical framework for handling retailer-specific requests and other exceptions, including their incremental cost, capacity, and schedule implications.
• Define useful measures of process effectiveness, such as on-time gate closure, changes to locked decisions, rework, and launch readiness; train teams and drive adoption.