Job Description

The Senior Product Manager for Location Planning (LP) & New Stores owns Location Planning end-to-end across all three modules of the Toolio platform — Merch Planning, Assortment Planning, and Allocation — ensuring that location strategies inform the buying intent and are a key point of reconciliation throughout the process.

In addition to platform-wide LP ownership, this role leads the discovery and product strategy for New Stores planning — a greenfield capability currently supported by manual processes. The right candidate will define what a modern, scalable new store planning product looks like for Nordstrom, evaluate build-vs-buy options, and own delivery from concept through adoption.

This is a senior, highly collaborative role that requires functional depth in location and/or new store planning, strong platform intuition, and the ability to drive alignment across merchant, planning, and technology stakeholders without direct authority. You will work closely with peer PdMs, engineering and data teams, and Toolio’s vendor organization to define and deliver LP capabilities that directly shape how Nordstrom plans and opens stores.
 

Strategy & Roadmap

• Own a multi-year capability roadmap for Location Planning across Merch Planning, Assortment Planning, and Allocation — ensuring LP is consistent and connected across all three modules.
• Lead product strategy for New Stores: define the future-state technical solution, evaluate build-vs-buy options, build the business case, and own delivery from concept through adoption.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI and automation to LP workflows — including cluster optimization, location-level forecasting, new store seeding, and performance ramp modeling.
   

Discovery & Definition

• Lead continuous discovery with location planners, new store teams, merchants, and allocators to validate priorities and ensure the roadmap reflects real workflow problems.
• Drive New Stores discovery: map the current manual process, identify pain points, and define requirements for a future-state technical solution.
• Own the LP product backlog — writing epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria that are clear and buildable across all three modules.
• Produce wireframes, process flows, and functional specifications sufficient for engineering and Toolio to design and build accurately.
• Partner with data and analytics teams to define measurement frameworks for LP effectiveness, new store ramp performance, and allocation accuracy.

Delivery & Cross-Module Coordination

• Serve as the integration point for LP across all three modules — ensuring location data, store clustering logic, and new store parameters are consistent across module boundaries.
• Coordinate release planning, UAT, and go-to-market readiness across impacted modules, ensuring LP changes are tested and adopted cohesively.
• Partner with peer PdMs to sequence LP work with upstream and downstream dependencies.
• Frame trade-off decisions with conviction — providing leaders with clear recommendations and driving alignment without requiring escalation.

Stakeholder & Vendor Partnership

• Build trusted partnerships with location planners, new store teams, merchants, allocators, and store operations.
• Manage day-to-day Toolio engagement on LP configuration, defects, and enhancements across all three modules — escalating clearly and advocating for Nordstrom’s priorities.
• Lead vendor evaluation for New Stores if a net-new tool is the right path — including RFP coordination and build-vs-buy recommendation.
• Represent LP and New Stores in program-level forums and executive status updates.

Required

• 5–8+ years of product management experience in retail planning, merchandising technology, or supply chain.
• Functional expertise in location planning and/or new store planning — store clustering, store grading, capacity planning, new store seeding, or location-level sales forecasting. Hard requirement.
• Fluency in retail planning concepts: plan hierarchies, BOP/EOP, sell-through, receipt flow, and how location-level decisions connect to financial and assortment outcomes.
• Experience owning product capabilities across multiple systems or workflows, with a track record of driving alignment across teams without direct authority.
• Comfort with ambiguity and greenfield product work — ability to define strategy and roadmap where no clear solution exists yet.
• Ability to write complete user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional specifications independently.
• Experience influencing vendor roadm