The Rainforest Alliance is creating a more sustainable world by using social and market forces to protect nature and improve the lives of farmers and forest communities. To achieve our mission, we partner with diverse allies around the world to drive positive change across global supply chains and in many of our most critically important natural landscapes.
Our alliance spans 70 countries and includes farmers and forest communities, companies, governments, civil society, and millions of individuals. Together we work to protect forests and biodiversity, take action on climate, and promote the rights and improve the livelihoods of rural people.
As an international nonprofit organization with more than 30 years of experience in sustainability transformation, we understand that the social and economic well-being of rural communities is tightly connected to ecosystem health. This knowledge has shaped our rigorous programs to advance sustainable land-use and commodity production.
At the Rainforest Alliance we combat climate change, protect forests and biodiversity, promote human rights, and improve livelihoods. The enormity of the social and environmental challenges we are facing requires working together in a broad alliance. This is why we bring farmers, forest communities, companies, and consumers together to change the way the world produces, sources, and consumes.
Why
To protect nature and improve lives it’s becoming increasingly urgent that we approach the way we use our land and produce food and other products in more sustainable ways. For this to succeed we need to fundamentally change the way that businesses operate and source, and the choices we all make as consumers.
How
Our growing global alliance aims to transform our relationship with our natural resources and each other, to create a better future for people and nature together.
The Rainforest Alliance encourages diversity and inclusion across the global organization. With this commitment to diversity, we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ages, disability and any other protected group.
Position summary:
The Supply Chain Excellence department provides guidance, services and digital tools to producers and companies, enabling them to join our programs, achieve certification, monitor progress, trade and make sustainability claims, and generally manage their supply chains and responsible sourcing relationships
The team is structured across five pillars, accountable for the consolidation and alignment of strategic programmatic direction (concept owners); the design process and overall architecture; change project program management; development; and customer success / support. These teams work closely together, and with key internal and external stakeholders, to deliver our concept strategies.
As a Product Manager your role is to work with key internal and external stakeholders across the Rainforest Alliance to co-create and land the strategy, vision, and continuous improvement agenda for the processes and tools supporting your concept(s), continually looking to advance the value proposition in your space, making today better, and creating the future.
You will translate the strategy and vision into a roadmap with concrete objectives and serve as the focal point for communications on concept progress to your stakeholders. You will assess and manage customer-centric business requirements, make total value assessments, and coordinate development needs in your respective area. You will lead requirement discussions with business stakeholders and process owners, and contribute to process development, by providing information on future functional needs for your respective business area.
You actively drive the development of business models and associated business process models for your specific area, working closely with product owners to define potential product solutions, while ensuring that best practices and principles are designed into requirements upfront.
Rainforest Alliance operates in Agile mode, hence you will work closely together with the Product Owner(s) in Agile teams and ensure that business concepts are developed and tested according to agreed requirements.
This specific role owns the concept of sustainability claims within the Rainforest Alliance. This means developing and landing our strategy for processes and tools supporting our partners ability to make claims about the work they do. This includes strategies for: Maintaining the credibility of Rainforest Alliance endorsed claims, approving the use of our trademarks, leveraging data to support results-based claims, and an integrated framework to unlock claims on work beyond certification.
Responsibilities:
- End to end responsibility for the claims concept; from business requirements to final process models, including the documentation;
- Work with business stakeholders in Customer Success, Markets Transformation, Marketing, Standards & Assurance and other key disciplines to develop an aligned 3-5 year strategy and ambition for sustainability claims;
- Work with business enterprise architect and portfolio manager to define the product roadmap;
- Convene cross-departmental workshops to that end, and ensure that the output is clearly captured, shared, and there is shared ownership/buy in from those involved;
- Be a problem solver, identifying underlying challenges and work proactively and collaboratively to solve them;
- Actively look for continuous improvement opportunities in close co-operation with internal and external stakeholders;
- Maintain strong relationships with partners in other teams and communicate changes to ensure alignment with key stakeholders;
- Document and analyze business requirements, and ensure they are correctly understood/captured into BPM flows and functional requirements;
- Operate as the business representative throughout change processes, making sure that the requirements are accurately understood, and consulting with stakeholders as necessary when new questions are raised;
- Ensure alignment with product owners and implementation managers in respective tool and process landscape according to the requirements;
- Create and maintain functional solution concept documentation in own responsibility area.
Participate in system design (UX), global testing and validation of test results; - Work closely together with the support organisation to develop and update trainings and e-learning materials;
- Support global roll-outs (internally and externally) in validation and implementation; and
- Be the voice of the claims concept internally and externally, clearly defining an intuitive storyline that captures the vision, strategy, progress, and next steps, and communicating that out on a continuous basis to generate interest, engagement, and value for our stakeholders.
Skills & Qualifications:
- BA degree in Business Administration, or related field. Masters Degree Preferred;
- Experience with business process management, and 10+ years experience in related field;
- Excellent problem solving and analysis skills; able to identify underlying issues and challenges and work collaboratively towards resolution;
- Strong influencing and facilitation skills with a proven ability to convene and reconcile different stakeholder interests and influence towards a common vision/plan;
- Expertise in systems thinking and change management, with experience landing strategic ambitions into concrete requirements that can be taken forward successfully;
- Experience working with voluntary standards within agriculture/forestry highly desired;
- Experience working within an Agile team framework;
- Excellent interpersonal skills with ability to interact culturally, linguistically, and diplomatically laterally and vertically;
- Self-motivated, creative and results-oriented, with a passion for innovation and challenging the status quo;
- Strong rational and emotional intelligence, with a demonstrated ability to remain calm and focused under pressure;
- Excellent writing, editing and verbal communication skills; and
- Ability to travel a maximum of 20% per year, nationally and internationally.
Salary: Commensurate with experience.
Deadline: February 28, 2022
Notes:
Only candidates authorized to work in USA, and our countries of operations in EU, Africa will be considered.
If you have any questions about the job vacancy, please contact the HR department: recruitment@ra.org