Position summary
The Senior Director, Operational Excellence & Quality Improvement leads the strategic enhancement of Gracenote’s end-to-end global operating model. This executive establishes robust governance, metrics, quality systems, and cross-functional alignment to drive customer trust, data accuracy, scalability, operational efficiency, and resilience.
Translating growth, automation, and content-modernization strategies into high-impact operating plans, this role leads cross-functional teams across Content, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Commercial, and Strategy to champion data-informed decisions and continuous improvement.
Key responsibilities
- Define and execute the global operational excellence and quality strategy across Gracenote.
- Establish high-impact performance governance, risk management, QA protocols, and continuous improvement frameworks.
- Align business goals with initiative portfolios, resource planning, and clear performance outcomes.
- Proactively mitigate operational, technology, and transformation risks before they impact customers.
- Own the end-to-end quality framework, including SOPs, audits, monitoring, alerts, and process QA.
- Lead incident management, root-cause analysis (RCA), and corrective/preventive action (CAPA) tracking.
- Eliminate customer-impacting defects, rework, and process variation at the root cause level.
- Build executive dashboards to track quality trends, SLA compliance, defect severity, and remediation progress.
- Partner with Product & Engineering on release readiness, UAT, change control, and post-release reviews.
- Drive data-driven transformation projects leveraging automation, process discovery, and change management.
- Advance human-in-the-loop (HITL) automation to scale operations, improve speed, and ensure precision.
- Coach, develop, and inspire high-performing global teams, embedding continuous learning and inclusion.
Measures of success
- Measurable reduction in customer defects, quality escapes, recurring incidents, and unnecessary rework.
- Increased RCA completion velocity, CAPA effectiveness, SLA compliance, and risk resolution rates.
- Enhanced throughput, cycle times, capacity management, productivity, and automation adoption.
- Higher customer satisfaction, operational resilience, operational transparency, and organizational capabilities.
- 12+ years of progressive experience in operations, quality, process excellence, transformation, content/data operations, product operations, or a related field, including significant leadership experience.
- Experience leading through multiple managers and/or senior functional leaders in a complex, global organization.
- Demonstrated success building operational excellence, quality-management, continuous-improvement, or business-performance systems.
- Strong knowledge of QA, process governance, root-cause analysis, corrective and preventive action, risk management, change management, KPIs, and executive reporting.
- Track record leading technology-enabled transformation, automation, process redesign, or platform modernization.
- Exceptional communication, influence, facilitation, decision-making, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience required; advanced degree or relevant certification preferred.
- Media, entertainment, metadata, data services, digital products, or complex content/technology experience preferred.
Leadership profile
- A systems thinker and pragmatic operator who moves comfortably between strategy and execution; creates clarity without waiting for certainty; balances quality, speed, efficiency, cost, and customer outcomes; and leaves teams stronger than they found them.
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