[Hiring] Director of Audience @Lee Enterprises

Role Description

BLOX Digital is seeking an energetic, strategic Director of Audience to lead the continued advancement of BLOX Audience+, our dynamic paywall and audience monetization solution. As a member of our product team, this leader will shape the technology, prioritize investment, and guide product development to help our media partners grow subscription revenue, deepen engagement, and retain more subscribers.

Audience+ helps partners connect audience behavior with personalized offers, flexible customer journeys, and subscription experiences that support conversion and retention. The Director of Audience will build on that foundation, identifying opportunities to make the solution more effective, easier to use, and responsive to the evolving needs of BLOX Digital’s customer base and their goals.

This is a hands-on product leadership role for someone who understands subscription economics and can translate that knowledge into technology that delivers measurable business value. The ideal candidate combines a clear product vision with strong execution, commercial judgment, and the ability to align teams around improvements that drive lasting partner success.

Key Responsibilities

• Set the vision and roadmap for Audience+
• Own the product strategy and roadmap for Audience+, aligning continued development with partner subscription goals, market needs, and BLOX Digital’s business priorities.
• Identify opportunities to improve acquisition, engagement, retention, and audience monetization across the subscriber lifecycle.
• Prioritize initiatives using customer evidence, revenue potential, usability, technical dependencies, development effort, and long-term product value.
• Define clear outcomes for product investments and communicate roadmap priorities, tradeoffs, and progress to internal stakeholders and partners.
• Turn audience strategy into better technology
• Lead product discovery and requirements for improvements to audience segmentation, dynamic metering, registration, offers, pricing, and customer journeys.
• Advance subscription experiences that reduce friction in checkout, account access, renewal, cancellation, and reactivation.
• Guide the development of tools that help partners test offers, understand performance, and act on audience insights with greater confidence.
• Evaluate practical uses of AI and automation to improve targeting, simplify workflows, and support better subscription outcomes, with clear measures of value.
• Lead development and delivery across teams
• Partner closely with engineering, design, analytics, and other product leaders to turn priorities into clear requirements, acceptance criteria, and achievable release plans.
• Maintain a disciplined product backlog and make informed decisions about scope, sequencing, dependencies, and tradeoffs throughout development.
• Work with technical teams to strengthen product reliability, performance, scalability, and integration across the BLOX ecosystem and relevant third-party systems.
• Coordinate validation, launch readiness, and post-release evaluation, ensuring new capabilities solve the intended problems and can be adopted successfully.
• Make partner needs central to product decisions
• Build a consistent feedback process through customer research, product usage data, support trends, and input from sales and implementation teams.
• Engage partners in discovery, usability testing, and pilot programs to validate needs and refine solutions.
• Translate recurring customer challenges into scalable product improvements that benefit organizations of different sizes and levels of audience expertise.
• Equip sales, marketing, implementation, and support teams with clear product positioning, release guidance, and training so partners can realize value from new capabilities.
• Measure impact and strengthen competitiveness
• Establish product measures covering feature adoption, task completion, reliability, and partner outcomes such as conversion, subscription revenue, engagement, and retention.
• Evaluate results against baselines, distinguishing the effects of product changes from pricing, campaigns, seasonality, and other influences on performance.
• Monitor subscription technology, payment experiences, audience data practices, and competing solutions to identify gaps and opportunities for differentiation.
• Develop business cases for product investment and use results to determine what should be expanded, refined, or discontinued.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Advertising, or an equivalent combination of education and work experience.
• Significant experience in product management, digital product strategy, subscription growth, audience development, or a related commercial discipline, with demonstrated responsibility for advancing technology products.
• Demonstrated success turning early-stage ideas into launched products, commercial offerings, partnerships, or revenue-producing programs.
• Experience owning a product roadmap, prioritizing development, defining requirements, and working closely with engineering and design teams.
• Strong commercial judgment, including experience assessing market demand, developing business cases, and evaluating financial potential.
• Understanding of subscription economics and the relationship between acquisition, pricing, engagement, churn, and customer lifetime value.
• Ability to interpret product and audience data, assess experiments, and translate findings into clear development priorities.
• Experience negotiating partnerships and working with senior decision-makers inside and outside an organization.
• Ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives, with strong communication, presentation, and relationship-management skills.
• Comfort operating in a changing environment with a high degree of ownership and ambiguity, and a practical, entrepreneurial approach to execution.
• Ability and willingness to travel as business needs require.
• Experience in media, subscriptions, membership, local commerce, education, technology, or another industry undergoing business-model transformation is helpful but not required.
• Familiarity with paywalls, customer data platforms, experimentation tools, or payment and renewal systems is vital.

Leadership Attributes

• Externally curious and alert to emerging business models and technologies.
• Commercially creative while grounded in data and financial discipline.
• Skilled at connecting customer needs with BLOX Digital’s distinctive assets and capabilities.
• Collaborative, credible, and effective across organizational boundaries.
• Comfortable testing ideas, learning quickly, and adapting based on results.
• Accountable for product delivery, adoption, and measurable business outcomes.

Salary Range

$110,000-$130,000

Benefits

• Help shape the next generation of audience technology for local media.
• Competitive wages in a dynamic, interesting work environment with career growth opportunities.
• Extensive benefit program that can be personalized to your needs.
• Medical, dental, vision, short and long-term disability, company provided life insurance and supplemental life insurance.
• 401K retirement plan with company match.
• Generous paid time off, including paid parental leave for new parents.

Company Description

Lee Enterprises is a leading provider of local news and information and a major subscription and advertising platform, with daily and weekly newspapers and rapidly expanding digital products serving 114 markets across 25 states. Our core commitment is to provide valuable, intensely local news and information to the communities we serve.

Lee Enterprises is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We respect and celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

For more information about Lee, check us out at www.lee.net .