Director, Marketing Strategy, Planning, and Operations

About this role

Who We Are

The Farmer’s Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We’re starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers’ doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer business model, holistic approach to growth, and dynamic culture uniquely position us to shepherd this backwards industry into the future.

To date, The Farmer’s Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

What We Stand For and Where You’ll Come In

The Farmer’s Dog is looking for a Director, Marketing Strategy, Planning & Operations to be the connective tissue across every pillar of Marketing so the organization operates from one shared view of spend, priorities, and goals. Reporting to marketing leadership, you’ll partner with Finance and every marketing pillar to build and manage the budget, bring rigor and risk assessment to how we plan, and make sure every channel is pointed at the same set of goals. This role is highly quantitative and sits at the intersection of strategy, finance, and operations.

One Team: We don’t think of ourselves as “Acquisition Marketers”, “Engineers”, “Data Analysts”, or “Product Managers”. Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don’t think departments matter. We’d rather align ourselves to the goals we’re working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER – getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.

We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing: Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren’t tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there’s a better or more impactful way to solve problems.

We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions: We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is. We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention. We answer questions and address problems early and proactively. We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.

We Execute For Impact: We don’t subscribe to “best practices” or “industry KPIs”. We’re uninterested in how we compare to “benchmarks”; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don’t subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles – i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.

We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption : We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, “what’s the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?”. We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don’t expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Own the end-to-end marketing budget process, to include planning, allocation, in-year reprioritization, and reporting, so every marketing leader and Finance partner works from a single, trusted view of spend across all pillars.

• Analyze and recommend cross-channel investment optimizations using CAC, LTV, Retention, and ROI to inform the media mix approach.

• Partner with marketing leadership and Finance to build annual and quarterly budget scenarios, translating business goals into funding recommendations and clearly laying out the tradeoffs behind them.

• Assess and surface risk across the marketing plan by focusing on pacing, channel concentration, dependency, and forecast variance, and bring forward mitigation options before they become problems.

• Build the operating cadence, encompassing planning cycles, budget reviews, cross-pillar syncs, and reporting rhythms so that every marketing channel and team is oriented around the same goals and priorities.

• Serve as the analytical backbone for marketing leadership, turning performance and spend data into clear, defensible recommendations that inform investment decisions.

• Partner cross-functionally with Finance, Data, and every marketing pillar, including Acquisition, Lifecycle, Brand, and Creative, to keep planning assumptions, KPIs, and definitions consistent across the org.

• Lead post-mortems and forecasting reviews on major marketing investments, capturing lessons learned and feeding them back into the next planning cycle.

• Build and maintain the tools, trackers, and reporting infrastructure that make marketing spend and performance visible to stakeholders at every level, from channel owners to executive leadership.

We're Excited About You Because

• You have 12+ years of experience in channel marketing analytics, strategic finance, FP&A, or marketing strategy and planning, ideally with exposure to a DTC or subscription business.

• You’re deeply numbers-driven, are comfortable building financial models, budget scenarios, and forecast

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