Senior Experience Planning & Merchandising Associate Manager

Why Sony Interactive Entertainment?

Sony Interactive Entertainment isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is the company behind the PlayStation brand. As a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, we’re part of a proud legacy of innovation and excellence. SIE is a dynamic technology company, delivering cutting-edge hardware and network services to more than 100 million people and an entertainment leader, home to some of the most beloved and recognizable intellectual properties (IP) in the world. Our role at SIE is to create and nurture the experiences under the PlayStation brand, a name synonymous with entertainment excellence and creativity.

Senior Experience Planning & Merchandising Associate Manager

San Mateo, CA (Hybrid)

Role overview:

Our team operates within the wider ‘Services Commercial’ group who are dedicated to growing PlayStation’s subscription services. This wider group strives to maximise new subscriber acquisition and retention and provide a compelling reason for people to return to the service year after year. Our product, PlayStation Plus, is critically important to PlayStation’s vision and strategy. PlayStation Plus is subscribed to by the majority of PlayStation users and has seen dynamic growth since re-launching with a multi-tiered proposition in 2022.

You will be joining the ‘Experience’ team – whose mission is to craft best-in-class customer experiences that foster an informed, engaged, and excited group of subscribers. What does that mean? Anywhere you find PlayStation Plus on a PlayStation console, or the PlayStation App, our team is determining what our customers see – the latest, the greatest, and the most relevant messages for each customer. We are responsible for both subscriber and non-subscriber experiences – maximising subscription purchases, tier upgrades, and engagement with service benefits. We optimize user experiences through continuous test and learn activity and bring ‘moments-that-matter’ to life through innovative merchandising.

As the Senior Experience Planning & Merchandising Associate Manager, your primary responsibility will be to bring organization, structure, and a calm head to our planning process. We work closely with a wide array of stakeholders who have a variety of priorities - you will build bridges between cross-functional teams at PlayStation, executing both the long-term and monthly merchandising plans – helping us to prioritise the right activities and efforts. We can target messages to specific groups of customers – which can become complex quickly – if you see this as an enjoyable challenge to manage – you’re the right person for us!

You will leverage your expertise in digital merchandising and commerce to execute best-in-class campaigns on our console and app storefronts – ensuring strong visibility and communication across relevant stakeholders. You will also partner closely with Content and Engagement teams to build and maintain a calendar of editorial moments with complete support plans. You’ll review and optimize our processes that help us go-to-market, making sure that every time we do something it’s better with each iteration.

You will coordinate merchandising efforts across numerous touchpoints, including game releases into PlayStation Plus, Live Services moments, engagement events, promotions and seasonal moments. You will also help maintain our evergreen merchandising experiences such as content collections and benefit education pages – ensuring proper content inclusion and consistently fresh creative. Your hands-on approach will involve a significant amount of stakeholder alignment, trade-offs, and the ability to adapt plans as business needs change.

The Experience team are on a growth journey – We’re expanding our team significantly, and we want you to help us with that journey.

What you’ll be doing:

Develop and execute an Experience plan:

• Support the creation and maintenance of a clear, visually structured Merchandising, Editorial, and Experimentation plan that integrates the priorities of cross-functional teams.
• Support the Merchandising team when interacting with the Content, Engagement, Marketing, and other cross-functional teams to ensure that merchandising priorities are properly planned for.
• Deliver on existing playbooks and processes to streamline planning and execution of our most common type of support and merchandising activity.

Experience Plan Delivery:

• Participate in Experience team weekly stand-ups – working internally to track progress on key initiatives within our calendar, track team actions, coordinate read outs, etc.
• Collaborate internally to project manage our merchandising activity through to execution – complete with campaign briefs, review cycles, QA, and post-mortems.
• Integrate learnings and recommendations from experimentation into our day-to-day business-as-usual merchandising efforts
• Maintain evergreen merchandising experiences such as content collections to account for changes in catalogue availability, optimized tool usage, and always fresh creative

Performance, accountability, and continuous improvement

• Collaborate on Experience campaign performance reports – working with other Experience team members on regular team and Executive reporting.
• Support post-mortem evaluations of plans - Working with relevant teams to evaluate activity results, identify operational friction points, and recommend process improvements.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration within Services and related teams – achieving visibility and buy-in for the Experience plan at all stages of calendar development and maintenance.
• Stay abreast of trends and best practices in digital commerce, merchandising and editorial – highlighting emerging industry trends to bring innovative ideas to the business.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years in a similar role with in-depth organizational & planning responsibilities and demonstrable experience of prioritizing activities to drive growth. 
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
• Strong project management skills with the ability to juggle competing programs/priorities.
• Experience working with project management tools, ideally Wrike (or similar)
• Proven record of delivering go-to-market plans for campaigns.
• Passionate about delivering the best for our customers and creating exciting and impactful experiences for the communities they represent.
• Strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to work collaboratively in global environment.
• Experience working cross-functionally across business, creative, and operational teams.
• Experience developing and delivering complex programmes in a scaled business.  
• A systematic, disciplined and logical approach to problem solving. 
• Comfort in using self-serve analytics tools (such as Tableau, DOMO, and others)

At SIE, we consider several factors when setting each role’s base pay range, including the competitive benchmarking data for the market and geographic location.

Please note that the base pay range may vary in line with our hybrid working policy and individual base pay will be determined based on job-related factors which may include knowledge, skills, experience, and location.
In addition, this role is eligible for SIE’s top-tier benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, matching 401(k), paid time off, wellness program and coveted employee discounts for Sony products. This role also may be eligible for a bonus package. Click here to learn more.

The estimated base pay range for this role is listed below.

$101,700—$152,500 USD

Please note, Sony Interactive Entertainment conducts background checks at the offer stage for all new employees (which may include criminal background checks for some roles) and will need to process personal information to support these checks.

Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Notice for more information about what personal information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and your data protection rights.

Equal Opportunity Statement:

Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category.

We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. We encourage everyone to respond.

Sony Interactive Entertainment is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.

3+ years in a similar role with strong organizational and planning responsibilities; Bachelor’s degree or equivalent; Proven project management skills with ability to prioritize; Experience with project management tools like Wrike; Record of delivering go-to-market plans; Passion for customer experience; Strong interpersonal skills for global environments; Experience working cross-functionally across business, creative, and operational teams; Experience developing and delivering complex programs in a scaled business; Systematic approach to problem-solving; Comfort using self-serve analytics tools (Tableau, DOMO).