Director of Operations, Hardware

About the Role

The Director of Operations, Hard Goods owns the end-to-end operational pipeline that turns WIN’s hard goods — including Smart Parks, Blast Motion, and TrainVR — into deployed, customer-ready products. This role is accountable for the full lifecycle from contract manufacturing through procurement, assembly, software provisioning, 3PL logistics, and last-mile shipping.

This is a strategic operational leadership role with a long-term mandate: build the supply chain and operations function that supports WIN’s hard goods portfolio as it grows across multiple product lines over the coming years. Success is measured by the volume of units shipped and successfully delivered each month, the unit economics of every product line, and the maturity of the systems and partnerships that make that volume repeatable.

You’ll own the S&OP process, drive financial discipline across the deployment cost stack, and manage a network of external partners (CM, assembly, 3PL, logistics) along with a small internal team. This is a role for someone who wants to build something durable — not just hit a quarterly number.

This position requires frequent visits to manufacturing sites and 3PLs located in Orange County, California.

Key Responsibilities

Procurement & Contract Manufacturing

• Own the relationship with our contract manufacturers across all hard goods product lines and ensure parts procurement runs smoothly against forecasted demand.
• Build, maintain, and own the S&OP process — aligning demand signals, production planning, and inventory positioning across the supply chain and across product lines.
• Anticipate supply risks (lead times, component shortages, quality issues) and put mitigations in place before they impact shipping volume.
• Develop the long-term sourcing strategy: dual-sourcing, regional diversification, supplier development, and cost-down roadmaps.

Assembly & Software Provisioning

• Manage assembly partners to ensure inbound inventory is checked in, verified, and built to spec across product lines.
• Own the software provisioning process at the unit level — ensuring the correct software, configurations, and serialization are loaded onto each system.
• Maintain the system-of-record tying each individual unit (ball tracker, sensor, gateway, headset, etc.) to a specific customer deployment, so we always know which serial numbers are destined for which customer.
• Drive quality gates and verification checkpoints at the assembly stage to catch defects before units leave the line.

Logistics, 3PL & Shipping

• Oversee the handoff from assembly to the 3PL — ensuring units are checked in accurately and inventory visibility is maintained across all product lines.
• Manage 3PL operations for outbound fulfillment: pick, pack, stage, and ship.
• Partner with logistics providers to ensure shipping from the 3PL to the customer is efficient, on‑time, and cost‑optimized.
• Continuously benchmark and negotiate freight costs and SLAs.

Financial Ownership

• Maintain total financial control over the landed cost of every WIN hard good — from parts through delivery — across Smart Parks, Blast Motion, TrainVR, and future product lines.
• Operate within a defined deployment budget, with clear visibility into variances and trade‑offs.
• When exceptions or trade‑offs are required, surface them with full context (cost, timing, quality impact) so leadership has the visibility to decide.
• Report monthly on cost per unit, budget vs. actual, and unit economics trends across the portfolio.
• Drive the long‑term cost-down roadmap as volume scales.

Team & Structure

• Small internal team supporting hard goods operations, with the model designed to scale through systems and partners rather than headcount.
• Extended team: a network of third‑party vendors and partners — contract manufacturers, assembly partners, 3PLs, and freight/logistics providers — managed directly by this role.
• This is a hands‑on operational leadership role. The Director is expected to be deep in the details of the pipeline — both on the ground with partners and in the spreadsheets behind them.

Who You Are

• You want to be where the work happens. Our procurement, assembly, and 3PL partners are in LA, and you want to be on‑site with them regularly — walking the assembly floor, looking at parts bins, sitting with the team that’s building and shipping our products. You believe operational truth lives on the ground, not in a status report.
• You are equally comfortable in the spreadsheet. Materials management, BOM reconciliation, landed‑cost models, inventory positioning — you can run these yourself, in detail, and you enjoy it. You don’t need an analyst to tell you what’s happening to your numbers.
• You think like an owner of the P&L. You care about the unit economics of every product line and the long‑term health of the supply chain, not just this month’s shipped volume. You make decisions that compound over years.
• You build for leverage. If you’ve answered “where’s that unit” or “what’s our landed cost” twice, you build a system to answer it forever. You scale through systems, vendors, and automation — not layers of people.
• You hold a high bar for quality and truth. You don’t ship a unit you can’t stand behind or a number you can’t defend. You bring leadership the truth — slipped shipments, blown budgets, your own mistakes — clearly and quickly.
• You’re a partner‑network operator. You know how to get world‑class work out of CMs, assembly houses, 3PLs, and freight providers. You’d rather build a great vendor relationship than hire a full‑time team to replicate the same capability internally.
• You think long‑term. You’re excited to build a hard goods operations function that supports WIN’s portfolio for years — across multiple product lines, growing volumes, and new categories we haven’t launched yet.

How Success Is Measured

• Primary KPI: Volume of WIN hard goods shipped and successfully delivered per month across product lines.
• Financial: Landed cost per unit vs. budget; total program spend vs. plan; cost‑down progress over time.
• Quality: Defect rate, return rate, and quality escapes at each stage of the pipeline.
• Reliability: On‑time delivery from CM → assembly → 3PL → customer.
• Process maturity: S&OP cadence and accuracy of demand‑to‑supply alignment across product lines.

Qualifications

Required

• 8–10 years of operations experience in a hard goods or hardware product company, ideally one that ships physical products at scale.
• Demonstrated ownership of end‑to‑end hard goods operations: contract manufacturing, assembly, and 3PL/logistics.
• Strong track record building and running an S&OP (or equivalent demand/supply planning) process.
• Experience managing third‑party vendors and partners as the primary operating model — comfortable getting work done through partners rather than only through internal headcount.
• Strong financial fluency: budgeting, landed cost analysis, variance reporting, and unit economics.
• Experience managing units with embedded software/firmware, including provisioning, serialization, and unit‑to‑customer tracking.
• Willing and eager to be on‑site regularly with partners in the Los Angeles area.

Preferred

• Background scaling operations across multiple product lines or SKUs.
• Experience with sensors, or connected hardware products.
• Familiarity with ERP / inventory / WMS systems used to track serialized hard goods.
• Experience operating in a multi‑product hard goods portfolio.

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