[Hiring] Director, eNewspaper Experience @USA TODAY Co.

Role Description

The Director of eNewspaper Experience leads the strategy and execution of the digital newspaper product to enhance, focusing on improving reliability, usability, and customer retention. This role involves managing vendor partnerships, coordinating cross-functional teams, and driving initiatives to reduce churn and improve engagement through data-driven decision-making and operational excellence.

• Lead eNewspaper strategy and execution: Owns the end-to-end strategy and delivery of the eNewspaper program, aligning efforts with customer retention and digital subscription goals.
• Manage vendor and cross-functional partnerships: Oversees vendor relationships including contracts and performance and collaborates with multiple departments to define product roadmaps and prioritize customer needs.
• Drive operational excellence and issue resolution: Leads project management for enhancements and reliability, establishes mechanisms to detect customer friction points, and coordinates rapid resolution of issues impacting customers.
• Measure success and innovate: Defines key metrics and dashboards to track retention and engagement, champions product innovations to reduce churn, and ensures clear communication with stakeholders and executives.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (e.g., Business, Marketing, Communications, Information Systems, or related discipline) or equivalent practical experience.

Requirements

• Typically, 10+ years of progressive experience in digital product management, program management, platform operations, and/or customer experience for a consumer-facing digital product (or an equivalent combination of education and experience); subscription business experience preferred.
• Proven track record of driving measurable outcomes, including improved retention/churn, engagement/adoption, customer satisfaction, and/or complaint reduction.
• Extensive experience managing strategic vendors/partners for a mission-critical platform, including contract/SOW oversight, governance cadences, SLAs, escalations, and performance management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in news/media, digital publishing, and/or eNewspaper/e-reading platforms; Technavia/Newsmemory experience is a strong plus.
• Experience with subscription lifecycle concepts (e.g., entitlements/access, authentication, billing impacts, onboarding, retention, and win-back, and customer care drivers).
• Experience building and running operational rigor (e.g., incident management, root-cause analysis/postmortems, release readiness, and service KPIs).
• People leadership experience and/or demonstrated ability to lead through influence in a highly matrixed environment.
• Comfort partnering with Analytics to define instrumentation, build dashboards, and use data to set priorities.

Skills

• Product, customer, and metrics: customer-experience problem solving; retention/churn and engagement analytics; product strategy and roadmap leadership.
• Program execution and operational excellence: program/project management at scale; incident management and root-cause discipline; change management for customer-facing releases.
• Vendor and stakeholder leadership: vendor management and negotiation (SLAs, QBRs, SOWs); cross-functional influence in a matrix; executive communication.
• Domain and technical fluency: digital subscription mechanics (entitlements, access, authentication); platform fluency to partner on requirements, defects, and integrations.