Job Description:
The Demand Planning Manager will focus on forecasting revenue and business metrics and delivering industry and competitive analysis to inform PlayStation Studios Live Services’ strategic planning and management. This role will work closely with Live Services leadership, studios, and various stakeholders to ensure that our teams have the insights and business case analysis they need to make timely, data-informed decisions.
The Demand Planning Manager will be an individual contributor responsible for owning the forecasts of multiple projects. You will rely on a variety of analytics methods and data sources to inform business cases, forecast future performance, build and maintain scorecard dashboards, and craft reports that quantify and summarize industry trends. This position will collaborate with product managers of individual live services titles, as well as marketing, sales, and finance teams. Your ability to drive an ambiguous request through to an exec-ready deliverable will be critical to success in this role.
Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain ongoing robust & accurate forecasting models with complex inputs to predict & measure business performance vs expectations (key outputs include Revenue, Active Users, and New Players)
- Own the relationships with the Sales and Finance teams. Key rituals include the cyclical forecasting process and flash forecast events
- Craft concise reports that communicate key findings from your analyses
- Document forecast assumptions and underlying analyses, and revisit those assumptions to help explain variance from forecast and improve the accuracy of future-facing predictions
- Build scenario models to inform business cases and strategic opportunities - from the initial modeling to quantify an opportunity to estimating expected costs of execution
- Build and maintain executive-friendly reporting scorecards to track KPI performance
- Analyze in-game and marketing data to uncover opportunities and inform model assumptions
- Partner with Analytics to define requirements for new data warehouse reporting structures to standardize repeatable reporting
- Provide ad-hoc analytics support for Product Management or central leadership
Required Skills:
- Complex financial modelling in Excel
- The drive to collaborate with partners to generate requirements and see them through to completion
- The ability to translate historical data and analysis into future-facing quantitative assumptions
- The ability to efficiently communicate results through data
- Experience building forecasts from imperfect data in a changing environment
- Advanced skills building clear, accessible dashboards, with a particular focus on executive scorecards for tracking business performance (Tableau preferred)
- Knowledge of basic statistics (summary statistics, distribution analysis, and significance testing)
- Attention to detail and a commitment to quality and polish
- Knowledge of video game industry trends and the competitive space
- Experience with industry analysis or market research
Nice-to-Have Skills:
- Experience managing or mentoring other analysts
- A degree in Economics, Math, Finance, Statistics, Business, or Accounting
- SQL skills
- A love of games!
