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HARRY’S TEARDOWN: We are working with a confidential client (Mountain Time Zone) in their search for a Director, Analytics. Relocation assistance is available, as this is an in-office position.

The client is a multi-brand consumer products company in the mobile device accessory category. They sell cases, screen protectors, chargers, and power supplies, and the adjacent hardware that lives in your bag, your car, and your nightstand.

They run two brands, multiple dot-com properties (US and international), a B2B program, and the marketplaces — Amazon and Walmart. Thousands of SKUs across the catalog. The business is real, mature, and profitable. The majority of the firm’s revenue comes from offline retail — the specialty channels where they have spent two decades building a dominant brand. The brand’s pedigree is real and well-established with consumers.

Their Amazon business is relatively small versus what category leaders are doing in the same SKUs. The dot-com business has massive upside, too. If you understand the dynamics of established consumer-product categories where retail strength has not translated to digital strength, then you already understand why this seat exists.

About the Market

Every time a consumer buys a new phone, they buy accessories alongside it. We all do it (Look at all that data!). That cycle is reliable and the buyer is high-intent. Meanwhile, the cost of reaching that buyer on Amazon is rising each quarter as Amazon increasingly monetizes its marketplace through advertising.

In the next five years, the brands that win on Amazon will be the ones whose analytics function can see contribution margin clearly at the SKU level — not blended ROAS, not platform-reported revenue.

Who is the customer? Actually, there are two types:

The retail buyer — somebody who walks into a specialty store after spending 4-figures on a new phone and treats the accessory as insurance for the device. And the online buyer, who is increasingly the same person making the same decision but at a different velocity, on a different surface. The middle of the market — call it the $30-to-$50 price band — is where the volume lives, and that’s the band where this client is losing share to weaker brands with better content. That gap is the prize.

Let me give you a few reasons why this seat matters:

ONE: The new Director walks into a function that is, in practical terms, being defined for the first time. The role has existed in title, but the dashboards, KPIs, tagging architecture, and reporting cadence have not. The GTM instance and the tagging layer are being rebuilt from the ground up as we speak. The new Director walks in and defines what “clean” looks like for the entire company — across two brands, multiple sites, B2B, international, Amazon, and Walmart. That kind of foundational mandate is rare and it is career-defining.

You can do reputation-enhancing work here.

TWO: The reporting line is the VP of Ecommerce — but the role works directly with the CMO and the CEO. The CEO is the most analytical executive on the leadership team, and if you saw his background, you’d know why. He has explicitly asked for a dashboard built to his own preferences and he is personally engaged in the performance cadence every week. Most analytics leaders never get that level of executive proximity at a company at this scale. If you’ve ever wanted to report to a CEO who appreciates what you’re doing as an analyst, this is your guy.

THREE: The mandate here is profit growth, not revenue growth. The CEO’s framing is unambiguous: enterprise value at this company is built off of operating profit dollars, and every analytics decision should ladder to that. Not vanity revenue. Not platform ROAS. Profit dollars.

You’ll be authorized to kill the dashboards no one actually uses to make decisions, anchor reporting to a P&L-linked driver tree, and push back on numbers that don’t add up — regardless of whose number it is.

The current Ecom team is partially remote, partially in HQ, and partially in a structure that — in the company’s own words — has people in roles that don’t always match the work, and channels owned by managers whose primary expertise is in a different channel. There’s nothing bad or sinister about that. The world is changing. You don’t need me to tell you that.

Yet the company is centralizing into HQ over the next six months. You’ll be walking into a real change-management situation. That is the honest version. The opportunity is that the candidate who thrives in a dynamic situation — who can come in, diagnose where to point the rifle, and execute with discipline — has unusually clear air to make a career-defining mark.

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Director of Analytics owns the data architecture, tagging standard, attribution methodology, and reporting layer across a multi-brand consumer-products platform — .com properties (US and international), B2B, Amazon, and Walmart.

Your mission will be to …

1.) define and build a clean, margin-aware data foundation that the CMO, CEO, and VP of Ecommerce can actually run the business from,

2.) tell leadership where to focus the business — which channels to invest in, which SKUs to push, which conversion gaps to close, and where contribution margin is leaking — with the analytical rigor to back every recommendation, and

3.) move the company’s attribution model off last-click and toward incrementality, in step with the GTM rebuild that is already in flight. THIS IS NOT a managing-down role to start — you will direct two contractors (an Analytics Engineer and a Tagging & Tracking Specialist) and build a permanent team around you as the function matures.

You won’t believe how much we know about this search …

I spent a ton of time on the phone with this client teasing out exactly what you’ll need to KNOW and DO to hit the ground running in this role. Some of the things we can share with highly qualified candidates include …

1. The “real” background requirements for this position, along with the top five things all resumes MUST have to be considered for the role. Forget the generic job description — here’s what the hiring team actually screens for before your resume ever reaches a human. These are the non-negotiables: the specific experience, metrics, and proof points that separate the candidates who get a call from the ones who get a form rejection. If your resume doesn’t show these five things clearly, it won’t matter how good you are.
2. The top five problems that exist due to this position being open. Every open role has a story behind it — and this one’s no different. These are the real brush fires you’ll be expected to walk in and start managing in your first 30 days. Understanding them before your first interview puts you miles ahead of every other candidate in the room. This is the stuff they won’t tell you until you’re already hired.
3. What your average day and week will actually look like in this role. The job posting gives you the highlight reel. We’re giving you the game film. Here’s how your time will actually be spent — the meetings, the reporting cadences, the cross-functional dependencies, and the recurring fires that will own your calendar. Reality always looks different from the job description, and you deserve to know what you’re walking into.
4. The leading and lagging KPIs that will determine your success in this role. This is how you keep score. Leading indicators tell you whether you’re building momentum. Lagging indicators tell you whether it worked. Know both before Day One and you’ll look like the smartest person in the room — because you’ll be speaking the language of the business before anyone asks you to.
5. The major projects you’ll need to complete by Day 100 to be considered a home run in this position. There’s a short window at the start of every new job where you can build credibility fast — or squander it. We’ve mapped out the specific wins that will signal to leadership that they made the right call hiring you. Nail these and you’ll own the room. Miss them and you’ll spend the next six months playing catch-up.

PLUS … A candid look at the org consolidation already underway, the specific conversion gap the CEO believes is worth meaningful enterprise value if closed, the reviews-and-UGC program that has been quietly bleeding the brand at retail, and the agency stack changes coming in the next 90 days — all of which directly affect what the new Director will inherit on day one.

We have a massive amount of proprietary intel to share with qualified candidates. Our industry research for this assignment exceeds 75 pages! Be sure to TEXT Harry Joiner at (404) 281-2025 for this info. Or simply use the email link when you apply for the role below.

AREAS OF OVERSIGHT

Data Architecture & Infrastructure

• Own the marketing and Ecommerce data architecture across both brands, from raw event collection through transformation, storage, and visualization. That means full coverage: .com properties in the US and internationally, B2B, Amazon, and Walmart. If data moves through a customer-facing touchpoint, you are responsible for making sure it’s captured, structured, and usable.
• Define the standard for what “clean” looks like at the tagging and tracking layer. Tagging must be comprehensive, accurate, and maintained across every Ecommerce and marketing touchpoint — paid media, email, organic, B2B, and the marketplaces. If a channel touches a customer and it isn’t tracked correctly, that’s on your watch.
• Build and maintain data pipelines that consolidate channel-level and site-level data into a single, reliable source of truth across the full brand portfolio. The business is running two brands across multiple channels and platforms simultaneously. Your job is to make the data tell one coherent story — not five fragmented ones.
• Call the shots on the right tools for the job. The current stack includes GA4, Google Tag Manager, Looker / Looker Studio, BigCommerce, and Shopify. A platform consolidation is actively under evaluation, and the new Director will have a real voice in how that decision gets made. This is not a “maintain what’s already built” role — it’s a “make the call and own it” role.
• You are not the engineer — you are the standard-setter and the director. You define the requirements, hold the bar, and manage the Analytics Engineer and Tagging & Tracking contractors who do the build. The expectation is that you know exactly what good looks like and can get others to build it that way, consistently.

Margin Intelligence & Where-to-Point-the-Business

• Build the analytical layer that tells leadership where to point the rifle. Which channels to invest in. Which SKUs to push. Which price tiers to capture. Which conversion gaps to close. Which agency dollars to redeploy. Every recommendation you make must be defensible and tied directly to a P&L outcome — not a dashboard metric that looks good in a slide deck.
• Serve as the analytics resource across every Ecommerce vertical in the business. Merchandising, CRO, UI/UX, Lifecycle & CRM, Inventory, B2B, and International all run through you. Your job is to make sure every function is operating from the same clean, margin-aware foundation — not running off their own spreadsheets and drawing their own conclusions.
• Own contribution margin reporting at the SKU, channel, and site level across the full portfolio. This is not a high-level roll-up exercise. You need to know — at any given moment — exactly where margin is being lost and precisely where it can be grown. If leadership has to ask, you’re already behind.
• Master the four modes of analytics and apply them deliberately: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. What happened. Why it happened. What will happen next. What you should do about it. The CEO speaks this language fluently and will expect his Director of Analytics to speak it back with equal precision and confidence.
• Monitor the highest-margin products and channels on a continuous basis and flag performance shifts before they become problems. The goal is to surface a deteriorating trend while it’s still a brushfire — not after it’s compounded into a quarter-end surprise that nobody saw coming. Your job is to see it coming.

Attribution & Measurement

• Own the attribution methodology across all .com properties. Define how credit is assigned across channels and make sure the model reflects the actual customer journey — not the platform’s self-serving version of it. Google will tell you Google wins. Meta will tell you Meta wins. Your job is to find out who actually wins.
• Stage the move toward incrementality-based attribution in the right sequence. Tagging governance comes first. Multi-touch comes second. Geo holdouts and lift studies come third. MMM enters the picture only where the data can actually support it. There is no shortcut here — and no incrementality theater built on top of broken tagging.
• Partner with the Head of Performance Marketing through an active agency evaluation. That means assessing paid-media partners and attribution technologies through a margin lens, not a revenue lens. An agency that drives top-line growth while quietly destroying margin is not a win — and you’ll be the one who can prove it.
• Establish UTM standards, tracking-parameter governance, and data-governance practices that hold across every team, every agency, and every property. Not guidelines. Not suggestions. Standards — with teeth. If an agency or internal team goes rogue on tagging, the data breaks and the attribution model lies. Your governance framework is what prevents that from happening at scale.

Reporting & Executive Visibility

• Build and own the reporting layer: dashboards, automated reports, and ad hoc analyses that serve Ecommerce verticals, the VP of Ecommerce, the CMO, and the CEO. Every artifact in the reporting layer should answer a real business question that someone in the C-suite is actually asking — not a question that was relevant two years ago and never got cleaned up. If a report doesn’t drive a decision, it shouldn’t exist.
• Ensure every report reflects true business performance — not platform-reported metrics in isolation. That means contribution margin, CAC, LTV, conversion, and channel efficiency are always in the frame. Platforms report what makes platforms look good. Your reporting layer exists to tell the truth about what the business is actually doing.
• Build the CEO’s dashboard to his preferences — and get it right. He is engaged, he is analytical, and he is watching. This is not a checkbox deliverable. Nail this early and you will have his trust for the rest of your tenure. Miss it and you will spend the next six months defending your credibility instead of doing your job.
• Translate complex data findings into clear, actionable language that non-technical executives can act on immediately. The insight that lives inside a Jupyter notebook and never makes it into a decision is worthless. Your job is not just to find the answer — it’s to make the answer impossible to ignore and easy to act on.
• Kill the dashboards no one uses and anchor the surviving reports to a P&L-linked driver tree. Every company has a graveyard of reports that someone built, no one reads, and everyone is afraid to delete. You are not afraid. Audit the reporting layer ruthlessly, cut what doesn’t earn its place, and make sure everything that survives is tied directly to a business outcome.

Execution & Accountability

• Build and own the reporting layer: dashboards, automated reports, and ad hoc analyses that serve Ecommerce verticals, the VP of Ecommerce, the CMO, and the CEO. Every artifact in the reporting layer should answer a real business question that someone in the C-suite is actually asking — not a question you invented to justify the dashboard. If no one is making a decision off of it, it shouldn’t exist.
• Ensure every report reflects true business performance, not platform-reported metrics in isolation. Contribution margin, CAC, LTV, conversion, and channel efficiency are the numbers that matter. Platform dashboards are a starting point, not a finish line. Your reporting layer tells the story those platforms were never designed to tell.
• Build the CEO’s dashboard to his preferences — and get it right. He is engaged, he is analytical, and he is watching. This is not a task to delegate or to treat as a v1 that you’ll clean up later. Nail this early and you will have his trust for the rest of your tenure. Miss it and you will spend months rebuilding credibility you didn’t have to lose.
• Translate complex data findings into clear, actionable language that non-technical executives can act on immediately. The insight buried in a SQL query is worthless until it changes a decision. Your job is not to show your work — it’s to make the business move. If a C-suite executive has to ask what something means, the translation failed.
• Kill the dashboards no one uses and anchor the surviving reports to a P&L-linked driver tree. Every organization accumulates reporting debt — dashboards that were built for a meeting that ended two years ago and never turned off. Your job is to cut through that noise, eliminate the dead weight, and rebuild the reporting layer around the metrics that actually drive the business.

Contractor & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Direct and manage a two-person contractor team from day one: an Analytics Engineer and a Tagging & Tracking Specialist. The Analytics Engineer owns the pipeline and infrastructure. The Tagging & Tracking Specialist owns implementation and QA. You set the priorities, review the work, and hold both accountable to quality and timeline. This team runs as well as you run it.
• Build and lead a permanent analytics team around you over time as the function matures and the infrastructure stabilizes. The contractor setup is the starting point, not the destination. As the data foundation gets cleaner and the business’s analytical appetite grows, you’ll be the one making the case for headcount and defining what the team needs to look like at the next stage.
• Partner with Finance to make sure Ecommerce reporting and the company’s P&L are telling the same story. Revenue, margin, and cost data must reconcile — full stop. If Finance is running one set of numbers and Ecommerce is running another, the business is flying blind. Your job is to close that gap and keep it closed.
• Collaborate with Product Management to ensure analytics instrumentation is built into every platform development, migration, and site build from day one — not retrofitted after launch. That includes B2B and international properties. Tracking that gets bolted on after the fact is always incomplete. Your seat at the product table exists to prevent exactly that.
• Act as the internal standard-bearer for data accuracy and reporting integrity across the business. If a number is wrong, you find it before someone else does. Before the CEO sees it. Before Finance flags it. Before an agency uses it to justify a budget they don’t deserve. The credibility of every report, every dashboard, and every recommendation runs through you.

QUALIFICATIONS

Education & Certification

• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative, business, or marketing discipline — or equivalent experience demonstrated through track record. The degree is a signal, not a gate. If you’ve built the infrastructure, owned the attribution, and delivered the margin-aware reporting at the level this role demands, the pedigree is secondary. Show us the work.

Functional Competencies — Skills, Knowledge & Experience

• 7+ years in marketing analytics or a closely related field, with a demonstrated track record of defining and building data infrastructure in partnership with engineering teams. Not just consuming what engineering hands you. There is a meaningful difference between someone who has directed the build and someone who has inherited it. This role requires the former.
• Proven experience auditing and remediating a broken or incomplete data layer in a real Ecommerce or DTC environment. We don’t want theory. We want scar tissue. If you’ve never walked into a tagging disaster and had to rebuild trust in the data from the ground up, this is not the right seat for you yet.
• Hands-on, build-level experience with GA4, Google Tag Manager, and Looker or Looker Studio. You have built in these tools yourself — not just reviewed outputs from them. If your experience is limited to reading dashboards someone else constructed, that does not qualify as hands-on for the purposes of this role.
• Shopify Plus experience is required. BigCommerce experience is a strong plus given the active platform evaluation currently underway. If you have meaningful depth in both, say so clearly — it matters to this search.
• Experience supporting multi-brand or multi-site Ecommerce environments — including international and B2B properties — is a major plus. The complexity here is real. Two brands, multiple channels, and properties that operate under different rules. Candidates who have only managed a single-brand, single-market setup will face a steeper learning curve.
• Background in a multi-channel DTC or performance-marketing environment where contribution margin was a primary reporting metric, not an afterthought. If your current or most recent role treats margin as something Finance worries about, you may not be the right fit. This business runs on margin awareness at every level of the analytics function.
• SQL proficiency is required — you can write and troubleshoot queries independently. You do not wait on an engineer to pull data for you. This is not a role where you can delegate your way around a data request. If you need someone else to write the query, you are creating a bottleneck this team cannot afford.
• Working knowledge of data pipeline concepts: ETL / ELT, data warehousing, and how raw event data becomes reporting-ready. You do not need to be the engineer who builds the pipelines. You do need to be the director who can define the requirements, evaluate the output, and identify when something upstream has broken the data downstream.
• Strong tagging and tracking fundamentals are non-negotiable: GTM implementation, event schema design, pixel management, and QA methodology. The tagging layer is the foundation everything else is built on. If your fundamentals here are soft, the attribution model lies, the dashboards mislead, and the business makes decisions on data it cannot trust.
• Familiarity with attribution modeling concepts — last-click, data-driven, multi-touch, and incrementality — and practical experience applying them in a real P&L context, not in a vendor demo. Every platform will show you an attribution story that makes the platform look good. Your job is to build the model that tells the truth. That requires having done it before under real business conditions with real consequences.
• A teachable point of view on the four modes of analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. You can give concrete examples of each from your own work and explain how you sequenced them in a real business decision. If you can only define the four modes but cannot demonstrate them from experience, that is not sufficient for this role.
• Experience with at least one BI or visualization platform at a build level, not a consumer level. Looker, Looker Studio, Tableau, Power BI, or equivalent all qualify — provided you have actually constructed the reporting layer, not just navigated it. Consumer-level familiarity with a BI tool is table stakes. Build-level ownership is what this role requires.

Leadership & Management / Behavioral Competencies

• Demonstrated ability to dig into data and build a defensible point of view from it — not just summarize what the dashboard already shows. Anyone can read a chart. This role requires someone who can interrogate the data behind it, find what the chart is hiding, and walk into a room with a conclusion that can survive pushback from a CEO who has seen the same numbers you have.
• A track record where you personally owned a portion of a business and grew it. Not a track record of being at a company while the company grew around you. The CEO is explicit about this distinction — and he will probe for it in the interview. Come prepared with the specific thing you owned, the baseline you inherited, and the number you moved.
• Ability to lead through influence across Ecommerce vertical leads and channel managers who do not report to you. You cannot order them to fix margin leakage. You have to make the case with the data, earn the credibility, and bring them along. If your leadership style depends on org-chart authority, this environment will be a hard adjustment.
• Confident communicator with senior executives — the VP of Ecommerce, the CMO, and the CEO will all be at your table. That means translating complex findings into clear language, holding your ground when challenged, and knowing the difference between a question that deserves a direct answer and one that deserves a follow-up analysis. Both happen regularly at this level.
• Comfortable pushing back when a reported metric does not hold up to scrutiny — regardless of whose number it is. The agency’s number. The platform’s number. The channel manager’s number. If the data is wrong, your job is to say so with evidence and offer a better version of the truth. Political comfort with bad data is not a skill this role rewards.

Personal Characteristics

• Thrives in a broken situation. This is an active rebuild, and the environment will reflect that. The candidate who needs clean systems, tidy documentation, and a well-organized handoff on day one should pass on this role. The candidate who sees a broken data layer as an opportunity — and knows exactly how to sequence the fix — should apply immediately.
• Profit-growth mentality. You instinctively think in EBITDA dollars and contribution margin, not in vanity revenue. Top-line growth that quietly destroys margin is not a win — and you are wired to know the difference before anyone else in the room does.
• High integrity. This role exists in large part because reporting integrity matters to leadership and the standard has not been consistently upheld. The new Director is the standard-bearer. That is not a figurative title — it is the actual job description.
• Self-directed builder. You are energized by ambiguity and broken systems because you know how to fix them. You do not need a project manager to tell you what to prioritize. You assess the landscape, sequence the work, and start building before anyone asks you to.
• The margin keeper mindset. You are constitutionally unwilling to let a number slide that does not add up. Not because someone is watching, but because a number that does not add up means a decision somewhere downstream is going to be wrong — and that is not acceptable to you.
• Closer, not just an analyst. You stay in the work until the analysis drives a real decision and a real outcome. A beautiful model that sits in a folder and never changes anything is not a deliverable in this role. The job is done when the business moves, not when the spreadsheet is finished.
• Clear communicator. You can explain what the data says, what it means, and what to do about it — without drowning people in technical detail. The C-suite does not need to understand the query. They need to understand the decision. Your job is to close that gap every single time.
• Forensic posture. You ask the question that most analytics professionals skip: would this number pass an audit? Would it hold up in diligence? If the answer is no, you fix it before someone else finds it. Because someone always finds it.
• Resilient. You will regularly be in rooms where you are challenging numbers that other people are emotionally attached to — channel managers defending their CAC, agencies defending their ROAS, executives defending their forecasts. Stay calm, stay specific, and stay focused on the margin. The data is your authority. Use it.

Apply for This Role

Applications for this position are being coordinated by Harry Joiner. To apply, CLICK HERE. Candidates, please be sure to email Harry for a packet of market research and company / competitive intel that will differentiate you in your candidacy. Due to the intensely competitive nature of this search, thorough preparation for these interviews with this proprietary material is strongly recommended.