Principal Program Lead, New Business Innovation

Overview

Chick-fil-A's steady hand in the innovation space has led to breakthroughs like Meal-kits, 3rd-Party Delivery (DoorDash, UberEats etc.), Chick-fil-A Delivery and Consumer Package Goods like sauces and chips, to name a few. These innovations would not be possible without the partnership our digital transformation group has had with our business incubation function which seeks to support nascent business concepts and capabilities all the way to integration and scale within our core business. As Sr. Lead, Business Incubation, you will be the primary technology partner to the Business Incubation function within the Marketing department and support the team's full portfolio of products and services to help drive their goals of growing new business concepts. You will be responsible for driving technology strategy for this area as well as hardware and software solutions that meet experience goals while also managing technology operations in order to accelerate the growth of this portfolio and to help it fold into and scale within the core business. This will be a dynamic and fast-moving area with many new ideas and numerous iterations. You will sit on the Outcome Acceleration team as part of the Customer Technology Solutions (CTS) sub-team within the Digital Transformation & Technology (DTT) department. Outside of Business Incubation you will have stakeholders in Customer Digital Experience, Innovation & New Ventures, DTT Restaurant Network & Infrastructure, Design & Construction, Menu & Packaging and our Chick-fil-A Restaurant and Customer help desks. You will be the single and most important technology connection point for technology with CTS and the DTT department for this body of work.Of particular note in this portfolio will be the latest and largest addition—Little Blue Menu, Chick-fil-A's newest restaurant concept in College Park, MD, that introduces new branding, new products (e.g. Chicken Wings, Beef Burgers, Pizza, Pastries, etc.), new technology, new service processes and new segments of customers among other things. You will be part of the Little Blue Menu Core Team and will have management responsibilities for multiple technology partners, contracts, and budget. You will help prepare new menu categories for launch, direct custom development across all areas of customer technology including native app, mobile web, and Customer Relationship Management, recommend and deploy hardware, manage SaaS services and influence restaurant design in order to validate and grow this concept. You'll will lead this body of work independently with wide latitude for unreviewed decision-making, while collaborating and aligning with partners to deliver value to business stakeholders and will be accountable to the Little Blue Menu Leadership team (LBMLT). This role will involve navigating a dynamic and changing business environment with numerous pivots to products, process, and iterations to approach. It will also require high influence to bring the core business along, to inspire them to embrace large, frequent, and often uncomfortable changes. Because of the delicate nature of these business concepts, you will be expected to travel at minimum quarterly to visit concepts such as Little Blue Menu, manage experiments with restaurant Operators to assess effectiveness of deployed solutions and attend future-focused conferences to stay abreast of the technology landscape. As the sole DTT representative on the core team, you will need a wide depth and breadth of software and hardware knowledge not only to support the Customer Technology perspective but to speak intelligibly and effectively to all other areas of DTT.This role reports to the Sr. Principal Team Leader of Outcome Acceleration, Customer Technology Solutions. This is a full-time role with full benefits for a 3-year period, during or after which candidates, should they choose, may apply for a full-time regular position, contingent on job qualifications/fit and availability.

 

Our Flexible Future model offers a healthy mix of working in person and virtually, strengthening key elements of the Chick-fil-A culture by fostering collaboration and community.

 

Responsibilities

• Influence overall business incubation business strategy to ensure alignment with DTT partnership principles
• Drive technology strategy and build technical roadmap for the Business Incubation program and portfolio of initiatives
• Drive and manage development and integration of software and hardware with customer teams across Customer Technology Solutions to create net-new functionality
• Propose, prioritize and build enhancements and new capabilities working with internal and external partners
• Manage and drive business needs and requests through the appropriate channel/teams to enable marketing, menu, operations and restaurant teams with technology
• Iterate on processes to create co