Director, R&D - Consumer Directed Innovation

Job Description

As the R&D Director of Consumer Directed Innovation, you will lead the consumer understanding, experience strategy, and design-led research agenda that drives breakthrough food and beverage innovation and renovation for the Kraft Heinz North American Zone (NAZ). This role exists to close the gap between understanding consumers, imagining what’s next, and bringing it to life—ensuring consumer learning is a core driver of product, portfolio, and platform decisions. You will define how consumer insights and experience frameworks are translated into actionable product requirements, guiding teams from early ambiguity through commercialization. This role blends research rigor with a builder’s mindset, enabling better decision-making and bigger, high-quality innovation outcomes. This role reports directly to the VP, R&D Consumer Experience & Innovation Capabilities.   

Essential Functions & Responsibilities 

• Strategic Program Ownership & Performance Metrics
  • Ownership of Strategic Programs: Serve as the definitive owner for high-visibility strategic programs, managing the end-to-end consumer experience roadmap across NAZ platforms, categories, and brands.
  • KPI Definition & Delivery: Define, track, and deliver on key performance indicators (KPIs) for all consumer experience programs. Establish success metrics—including consumer desirability and market fit—taking accountability for large-scale business impact.
  • White Space & territories: Identify future-facing opportunities by reframing ambiguous signals and tensions into clear innovation territories. Define experience principles and consumer value curves to anchor innovation over time.
  • Strategic Business Pipeline: Lead teams to develop a robust pipeline that translates consumer behaviors into actionable requirements, delivering innovation for core brands (1–2 years) and breakthrough platforms (4+ years).
• Design-Led Consumer Research & Prototype Realization
  • Prototype & Experience Evaluation: Shape and execute qualitative and quantitative research across discovery and validation, including usage/preparation testing, packaging evaluation, and in-home/ethnographic research.
  • Design Implementation: Partner with R&D, Sensory, and Product teams to lead the implementation of design elements into testing prototypes, ensuring physical products accurately reflect the intended consumer experience and formulation decisions.
  • Research Orchestration: Partner with Consumer Insights, Sensory, and external agencies to design research built to inform making and decision-making, not just learning.
  • Internal Advocacy: Serve as the internal consumer advocate, synthesizing research into business-relevant recommendations that influence product roadmaps and portfolio direction.
• Innovation, Realization & Trade-off Management
  • Trade-off Prioritization: Support the prioritization of consumer trade-offs across cost, nutrition, preparation, sustainability, convenience, and scalability to ensure consumer-led innovation successfully ships.
  • End-to-End Continuity: Ensure continuity of consumer intent from early exploration through development and commercialization.
  • Agency Collaboration: Lead agency collaboration across design and research partners, serving as the strategic lead for an ecosystem of external vendors.
• Complex Team Leadership & Capability Building
  • People Management: Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of ~14 professionals (including 2–3 direct salaried reports), setting expectations and building bench strength.
  • Capability Elevation: Elevate organizational capability in research design and insight application. Drive adoption of frameworks like Jobs-to-Be-Done and consumer journey mapping, as well as developing custom frameworks to advance innovation tailored to organizational needs.
  • Executive Influence: Act as a strategic partner to senior R&D and Marketing leadership, translating consumer understanding into platform strategies and investment choices.

People Management Responsibilities

• Team (salaried): 3 direct reports, 14 total team responsibility. 

Key Outputs & Deliverables 

• NAZ Execution: Lead the execution of the R&D Consumer Experience strategy and operating model.
• Learning Frameworks: Implement and continuously improve the Consumer Learning Plan Framework.
• Upskilling: Train and coach teams on technical tools, trend monitoring, and competitive benchmarking to embed consumer centricity into R&D ways of working.

Expected Experience & Required Skills

• Bachelor's, Master's or PhD in