Director of Demand Planning

Job DescriptionDIRECTOR OF DEMAND PLANNING\nReports to: Director of Planning & S&OP\n\nABOUT THE ROLE\nYou own the rolling demand forecast end-to-end — every channel, every brand, every SKU — and you own daily inventory allocation across DTC, Amazon, and wholesale when supply is constrained. Those two functions live under one roof by design. Forecast and allocation disconnected from each other are the root cause of most fill-rate misses and overstock problems. You fix that by owning both.\n\nToday, HydroJug's demand planning function has real talent in seat — Jelena Minic as Demand Planning Lead, channel planners covering Amazon (Roopesh Athmuri), Shopify (Hassan Ali), and Acta (Ivana Majstorovic), and Laszlo Steffensen running Allocation. What it doesn't have yet is a single accountable owner who knits those people together into a forecasting and allocation machine, sets the standard for forecast accuracy, and feeds the S&OP forum the numbers it needs to make decisions.\n\nThat's you.\n\nYou are also the person who makes Puressentials forecastable before it has history. You'll be building the new-launch demand modeling framework that your team will use when a brand with no sales data needs a 12-month demand plan.\n\nRESPONSIBILITIES\nRolling demand forecast — all channels + all brands\n\n – 13-week rolling + 12-month horizon forecast by SKU × channel × brand (HydroJug · Acta · Puressentials)\n – Owns the statistical baseline + qualitative overlay (promotional lifts, new item launches, seasonal curves, channel mix shifts)\n – Forecast reconciliation across Amazon, Shopify DTC, and wholesale PO pipeline — one number the business can plan from\n\n\nDemand review cadence into S&OP\n\n – Weekly Demand Review meeting — agenda ownership, pre-reads, decision capture\n – Feeds the Director of Planning & S&OP with demand-side sign-off for the weekly Supply Review and Monthly Executive S&OP\n – Demand assumptions are locked and published before the S&OP forum; surprises in the meeting are a failure mode\n\n\nForecast accuracy + bias by channel\n\n – Publishes forecast accuracy weekly by channel and top-50 SKUs\n – Owns the root-cause analysis when accuracy misses target — is it statistical error, lag in POS data, bad promo assumptions, or a new-item ramp model problem?\n – Drives the team toward MAPE trending down quarter over quarter\n\n\nDaily allocation oversight\n\n – Oversees Laszlo Steffensen (Allocation Manager) and the open Allocation Specialist seat\n – Sets allocation policy across channels when inventory is constrained — prioritization rules, fair-share logic, wholesale vs. DTC trade-offs\n – Reviews exception escalations from the Allocation Manager daily; makes the calls on constrained situations above the Allocation Manager's authority level\n\n\nTeam leadership\n\n – Demand Planning Lead: Jelena Minic (filled) — your planning anchor; owns statistical modeling rigor\n – Channel planners: Roopesh Athmuri (Amazon), Hassan Ali (Shopify), Ivana Majstorovic (Acta), Wholesale planner (open — one of your early hires), Puressentials planner (future, timed to brand launch)\n – Allocation Manager: Laszlo Steffensen (filled)\n – Allocation Specialist: open (P1 hire — in process in parallel with your onboarding)\n – You are accountable for the output of this team. Not just the process.\n\n\nSUCCESS CRITERIA\nFirst 30 days\n\n – 1:1s with every direct report, with the Director of Planning & S&OP, with the VP of eCommerce (Joel McAllister), the VP of Sales (CJ), and the CFO (Aaron Davis). You understand how each team's demand signals feed into the current forecast — and where those signals break down.\n – You've audited current forecast accuracy by channel. You know the MAPE on the top-50 SKUs. You know which channels are systematically biased high or low and why.\n – You've observed the current Demand Review cadence — what runs, what doesn't, what decisions slip out of the meeting.\n – You have NOT proposed a structural overhaul yet. You're learning.\n\n\nFirst 90 days\n\n – Demand Review runs on a clean agenda that produces a locked forecast number the S&OP forum can use. Pre-reads are out 48 hours in advance.\n – Forecast accuracy baseline is published and shared. The Director of Planning & S&OP and the CFO know where the numbers stand.\n – The open Wholesale Demand Planner is in seat or close to it.\n – Allocation policy is documented — the rules Laszlo works from are written down and agreed to with Sales, eCommerce, and Operations.\n – You've built the Puressentials new-item demand modeling framework — even if the brand hasn't launched, you have the scaffolding.\n\n\nFirst 6 months\n\n – Forecast accuracy at or trending toward ≥85% across primary channels.\n – MAPE on top-50 SKUs below 20% and declining.\n – Wholesale fill-rate execution for HydroJug accounts is not a surprise — the forecast matches the PO pipeline, and Allocation is executing against it cleanly.\n – The S&OP forum signs off on demand-side assumptions within the meeting. No post-meeting revisions.\n – The CFO has current demand numbers. Finance is in the loop.\n\n\nFirst 12 months\n\n – Demand planning is the forecasting backbone HydroJug runs on. New launches (including Puressentials) have a repeatable demand modeling process. The team isn't rebuilding from scratch every time.\n – Channel planners own their channels. They're not waiting for Jelena or you to build their forecast — they're bringing you a locked number with variance analysis.\n – Allocation decisions are fast and predictable. The rules are known. Exceptions are rare because the policy is good.\n – The open seats (Wholesale Planner, Allocation Specialist, future Puressentials Planner) are filled and contributing.\n\n\nQUALIFICATIONS\n1. The forecast is a decision input, not a report. The S&OP forum only works if it has a demand number it trusts. Your job is not to produce an accurate forecast in a vacuum — it's to produce a forecast that the Director of Planning & S&OP, the CFO, and the CRO are willing to build a plan on. That means the number is current, the bias is acknowledged, and the assumptions are visible.\n\n2. Forecast accuracy and allocation reliability are the same problem. Stockouts and overstock both trace back to the same root — demand signal quality. The reason this role owns both functions is that the planner who builds the forecast needs to see the allocation consequences when the forecast is wrong. Close that loop.\n\n3. Wholesale and DTC are different animals. Treat them differently. DTC (Shopify + Amazon) has fast, clean signal — sell-through is visible daily. Wholesale runs on PO lag — the signal is retailer POS pulled weekly from RetailLink, POL, and Syndigo, and the orders don't land for 6–8 weeks. Your channel planners need different models, different bias corrections, and different review cadences for each. Build those separately.\n\n4. The open Wholesale Planner is your first critical hire. Wholesale is the most data-intensive and relationship-sensitive channel to forecast. The Customer Planning Managers (5 CPMs who own account-level operations) are your partners on POS data and PO pipeline, but you need a dedicated planner who owns the wholesale forecast SKU × week × account. Fill that seat fast.\n\n5. Jelena Minic is your anchor. She knows the models, she knows the data, and she knows what was tried before. Don't come in and rebuild what she built. Come in and build on it. Her institutional knowledge is an asset you'll need, especially in the first 90 days.\n\n6. Puressentials has no history. Build the framework before the launch. A new supplement brand launching late 2026 needs a demand ramp model — category benchmarks, promo-lift assumptions, retailer new-item curves. You need that framework before the first PO is placed, not after. Start it in your first 90 days even if Puressentials launch is 6 months away.\n\n7. Lean by design. You manage a bench of 7–9 people (when fully staffed). That is a lean demand planning team for a multi-channel business. Don't propose headcount expansion before you've maximized the output of the existing bench. The answer to forecast accuracy problems is process and model quality — not more planners.\n\nABOUT HYDROJUG, INC.\nHydroJug, Inc. is a consumer brand headquartered in Ogden, Utah, designing and selling premium hydration and lifestyle products through direct-to-consumer and major retail channels.