Experience Planning & Merchandising Manager

PlayStation isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Today, we’re recognized as a global leader in entertainment producing The PlayStation family of products and services including PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®VR, PlayStation®Plus, acclaimed PlayStation software titles from PlayStation Studios, and more. PlayStation also strives to create an inclusive environment that empowers employees and embraces diversity.

Our team operates within the wider ‘Services Commercial’ group who are dedicated to growing PlayStation’s subscription services. This wider group strives to maximise new subscriber acquisition and retention and provide a compelling reason for people to return to the service year after year. Our product, PlayStation Plus, is critically important to PlayStation’s vision and strategy. PlayStation Plus is subscribed to by the majority of PlayStation users and has seen dynamic growth since re-launching with a multi-tiered proposition in 2022.

You will be joining the ‘Experience’ team – whose mission is to craft best-in-class customer experiences that foster an informed, engaged, and excited group of subscribers. We are responsible for both subscriber and non-subscriber experiences – maximising subscription purchases, tier upgrades, and engagement with service benefits. We optimize user experiences through continuous test and learn activity and bring the ‘moments-that-matter’ to life through innovative merchandising.

You will be the Experience Planning & Merchandising Manager, bringing organization, structure, and a calm head to our planning process. We work closely with a wide array of collaborators who have a variety of priorities - you will build bridges between the cross-functional teams at PlayStation, owning both the long-term and monthly merchandising plans – helping us to prioritise the right activities and efforts. You will balance alignment between merchandising activity and our ongoing calendar of experimentation, partnering with Content and Engagement teams to build and maintain a calendar of editorial moments with complete support plans. You’ll review and optimize our go-to-market processes to ensure continual improvement with each iteration.

You will coordinate merchandising efforts across numerous touchpoints – including game releases into PlayStation Plus, Live Services moments, engagement events, promotions and seasonal moments – using analytical and creative thinking to deliver day-to-day excellence and a longer-term strategy of being the very best at what we do. Your hands-on approach will involve collaborator alignment, trade-offs, and adapting plans as business needs change. The Experience team is on a growth journey and we are expanding our team significantly; we want you to be part of that journey.

What you’ll be doing

• Develop and own an Experience plan
• Lead the creation and maintenance of a clear, visually structured Merchandising, Editorial, and Experimentation plan that integrates the diverse priorities of cross-functional teams
• Drive the quarterly planning process for the Experience team - leading alignment sessions internally and ensuring that all activity is briefed into our team’s dashboard
• Act as the liaison between Content, Engagement, Marketing, and other cross-functional teams to ensure that merchandising priorities are properly planned for
• Develop playbooks and automated processes to streamline planning and execution of our most common type of support and merchandising activity
• Own Experience team weekly stand-ups – tracking progress on key initiatives within our calendar, team actions, and readouts
• Collaborate with ‘Services Optimization’ and delivery teams to project manage merchandising activity through to execution – with proper testing
• Integrate findings and recommendations from experimentation into day-to-day business as usual efforts
• Drive parity in implementing the Experience Strategy across all owned channels including PS4, PS5, PS App, and other related channels

Performance, accountability, and continuous improvement

• Collaborate on Experience performance reports – working with team members on regular team and Executive reporting
• Perform post-mortem evaluations of plans with relevant teams to evaluate activity results, identify friction points, and recommend process improvements
• Foster cross-functional collaboration within Services and related teams – achieving visibility and buy-in for the Experience plan at all stages of calendar development
• Stay abreast of trends and best practices in digital commerce, merchandising and editorial – highlighting emerging industry trends to bring innovative ideas to the business

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years in a similar role with strong organizational & planning responsibilities and demonstrable experience prioritizing activities to drive growth
• Proven record of delivering and building short and long-range plans, and securing stakeholder buy-in
• Experience developing and delivering complex programmes in a scaled business
• Strong project management skills with the ability to juggle competing programs/priorities
• Experience working with project management tools, ideally Wrike (or similar)
• Passionate about delivering the best for our customers and creating exciting experiences for the communities they represent
• Strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to work collaboratively in a global environment
• Experience working cross-functionally across business, creative, and operational teams
• Ability to communicate and lead across multiple levels in an organisation
• A systematic, disciplined and logical approach to problem solving
• Comfort in using self-serve analytics tools (such as Tableau, DOMO, and others)
• Strong presentation skills and fluency in PowerPoint
• Management consulting experience is a plus

Benefits

• Discretionary bonus opportunity
• Hybrid Working (within Flexmodes)
• Private Medical Insurance
• Dental Scheme
• 25 days holiday per year
• On Site Gym
• Subsidised Café
• Free soft drinks
• On site bar
• Access to cycle garage and showers

Please note, Sony Interactive Entertainment conducts background checks at the offer stage for all new employees (which may include criminal background checks for some roles) and will need to process personal information to support these checks. Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Notice for more information about what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and your data protection rights.

Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category. We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. PlayStation is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.