Marketing Process, Strategy, & Operations Lead (local to Houston, TX)

Hi,

2)Job Title: Marketing Process, Strategy, & Operations Lead

Location: Houston, Texas

Work Arrangement: Hybrid with regular onsite presence at Academy Sports + Outdoors

Engagement: Adobe Marketing Technology Transformation

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Marketing Process, Operations, and Data Lead to support a strategic marketing technology transformation . This individual will serve as a key bridge between Academy’s business stakeholders, marketing teams, data teams, technology teams, Adobe, and implementation partners.

The ideal candidate has a strong understanding of how enterprise marketing organizations operate, including campaign planning, customer segmentation, content workflows, personalization, measurement, and marketing data management. This person must be comfortable engaging directly with business leaders, facilitating working sessions, translating business needs into clear requirements, and guiding stakeholders through process and technology decisions.

This is not a purely technical role. It requires a business-oriented marketing professional who understands the data, platforms, processes, roles, and operating model required to deliver connected customer experiences.

Key Responsibilities

Marketing Process and Operations

• Lead discovery sessions with marketing, digital, e-commerce, analytics, data, and technology stakeholders.
• Document current-state marketing processes, pain points, dependencies, manual activities, and opportunities for improvement.
• Define future-state marketing processes across campaign planning, content creation, audience development, journey orchestration, activation, personalization, experimentation, and performance measurement.
• Assess marketing workflows, governance, decision rights, approvals, handoffs, and organizational responsibilities.
• Help establish a scalable marketing operating model that connects business processes, data, technology, and people.
• Identify opportunities to simplify processes, reduce campaign cycle times, improve collaboration, and increase marketing effectiveness.
• Translate business objectives into functional requirements, user stories, process flows, and measurable outcomes.
• Support prioritization of marketing use cases based on business value, customer impact, feasibility, and data readiness.
• Facilitate alignment across marketing, digital, IT, data, privacy, legal, and external implementation partners.

Marketing Data

• Understand the marketing data required to support segmentation, personalization, customer journeys, experimentation, analytics, and campaign measurement.
• Work with business and technical teams to identify relevant customer, transaction, product, behavioral, digital, loyalty, preference, consent, and campaign data.
• Help define business requirements for unified customer profiles, identity resolution, audience creation, and customer activation.
• Understand first-party, second-party, and third-party data and how each may be used within a modern marketing ecosystem.
• Evaluate data availability, quality, ownership, lineage, timeliness, and fitness for marketing use cases.
• Partner with data architects and engineers to translate marketing needs into data requirements, attributes, events, audience definitions, and activation specifications.
• Help define marketing taxonomies, naming conventions, metadata, KPIs, and measurement frameworks.
• Support discussions related to customer consent, preferences, privacy, data governance, and responsible data use.
• Understand how marketing data flows between source systems, data platforms, customer data platforms, analytics platforms, and activation channels.
• Support the development of audience strategies, including segmentation criteria, suppression rules, eligibility requirements, channel preferences, and measurement needs.

Business Engagement and Communication

• Build trusted relationships with Academy’s business and technology stakeholders.
• Communicate complex marketing, data, and technology concepts in clear business language.
• Facilitate executive interviews, stakeholder workshops, process-design sessions, and decision meetings.
• Ask effective questions, challenge assumptions respectfully, and help stakeholders reach practical decisions.
• Prepare concise presentations, meeting summaries, recommendations, requirements, and decision documents.
• Manage competing priorities and viewpoints across business units and partner organizations.
• Maintain clear documentation of decisions, action items, dependencies, risks, and unresolved questions.
• Present recommendations confidently to directors, vice presidents, and executive sponsors.

Marketing Technology Transformation

• Support the design and implementation of a modern marketing technology ecosystem.
• Provide functional leadership across customer data management, campaign orchestration, content operations, personalization, experimentation, analytics, and activation.
• Collaborate with Adobe, Capgemini, and other partners to align platform capabilities with Academy’s business needs.
• Help define use cases and requirements for platforms such as Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Target, Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, Dynamic Media, and Workfront.
• Participate in solution-design reviews and confirm that proposed capabilities address the underlying business processes and marketing outcomes.
• Identify business readiness, process, data, governance, and adoption dependencies.
• Support change management, training, operating procedures, and adoption planning.
• Help establish a roadmap that connects near-term priorities with Academy’s longer-term marketing vision.

Required Qualifications

• 8 or more years of experience in marketing operations, marketing transformation, customer experience, marketing technology, marketing analytics, or a related discipline.
• Strong knowledge of end-to-end enterprise marketing processes and operating models.
• Hands-on experience working with marketing-related customer, transactional, behavioral, digital, product, campaign, loyalty, consent, and performance data.
• Experience translating marketing needs into business, functional, process, and data requirements.
• Strong understanding of customer segmentation, identity resolution, unified customer profiles, audience activation, personalization, journey orchestration, and marketing measurement.
• Experience supporting large-scale marketing technology or digital transformation programs.
• Excellent verbal, written, presentation, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively with both business and technical audiences.
• Experience facilitating workshops and working with senior business leaders.
• Ability to organize ambiguous information, identify gaps, and develop clear recommendations.
• Ability to work effectively across multiple teams, partners, and workstreams in a fast-moving environment.
• Willingness and ability to work onsite regularly in Houston.

Preferred Qualifications

• Retail, consumer, e-commerce, loyalty, or omnichannel marketing experience.
• Experience with Adobe Experience Cloud, particularly Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time CDP, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Target, Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, Dynamic Media, or Workfront.
• Experience with customer data platforms, cloud data platforms, identity resolution, master data management, data activation, or marketing analytics.
• Familiarity with BigQuery or other enterprise cloud data platforms.
• Knowledge of content supply chains, digital asset management, campaign workflows, and omnichannel content delivery.
• Experience defining marketing KPIs, attribution approaches, test-and-learn programs, and campaign measurement frameworks.
• Experience working within a multi-partner delivery environment.
• Experience supporting organizational change, training, adoption, and marketing operating-model design.

Key Competencies

• Strong marketing business acumen
• Marketing strategy
• Marketing data fluency
• Executive-level communication
• Workshop facilitation
• Process design and optimization
• Requirements definition
• Stakeholder alignment
• Structured problem-solving
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Customer-centric thinking
• Decision and action management
• Adaptability in complex environments

Success in This Role

Success will be measured by the individual’s ability to build credibility with Academy’s business stakeholders, develop a clear understanding of its marketing processes and data, translate business priorities into actionable requirements, and help align the organization around a practical future-state marketing operating model and technology roadmap.