Brand Operations Manager

Job Title: Brand Operations Manager

Department: Brand

Reports to: Senior Brand Manager

Location: Baltimore, MD

Job Summary

The Brand Operations Manager is the coordination hub for LifeStraw’s marketing department — the connective tissue between Marketing, the Sales team, Amazon, and Ecommerce. Reporting to the Senior Brand Manager, this role manages the flow of cross-functional requests, maintains marketing dashboards and SOPs, drives consumer research and insights, and ensures the right work reaches the right team member at the right time. This role also serves as the project management backbone for the Creative team — helping prioritize projects, ensuring deadlines are met, and gathering the necessary information from Marketing and Sales so Creative has what they need to execute effectively.

This is the person who turns the brand’s strategic vision into an organized, repeatable operating system. With Brand Ops, every sales rep knows where to send a request, every project has a timeline, and every campaign has a brief.

Key Responsibilities

Cross-Functional Coordination & Request Management

• Act as the bridge between Sales and Marketing — fluent in both languages, translating sales requests into actionable, organized next steps with clear briefs, timelines, and deliverables.
• Serve as the central intake point for all marketing requests from the Sales team (across Outdoor, Retail, Amazon, International, and Institutional channels), Ecommerce, and internal stakeholders.
• Triage, prioritize, and route requests to the appropriate marketing team member (Sr. Brand Manager, Product Marketing Specialist, Creative, or Content & Social).
• Maintain a shared marketing request tracker and project calendar visible to all stakeholders.
• Establish and enforce SOPs for creative briefs, campaign timelines, asset handoffs, and approval workflows.
• Run weekly cross-functional syncs with Sales and Ecommerce to align on priorities and communicate marketing capacity.

 

Creative Team Project Management & Support

• Partner directly with the Creative Director to manage the Creative team’s project pipeline — helping prioritize requests, set realistic timelines, and flag capacity constraints before they become bottlenecks.
• Ensure all creative briefs from Sales and Marketing are complete, contextualized, and actionable before reaching the Creative team — reducing back-and-forth and rework.
• Proactively gather missing information from Sales, Marketing, and other stakeholders so the Creative team can execute without delays.
• Track creative project status and deadlines, providing visibility to the Sr. Brand Manager and VP of Marketing on workload, turnaround times, and any at-risk deliverables.
• Serve as a buffer for the Creative team against ad-hoc, last-minute, or under-briefed requests from Sales — ensuring requests follow established intake processes and include sufficient context and lead time.

Consumer Research & Insights + Sales Data

• Own LifeStraw’s consumer insights function: design and execute research studies (surveys, focus groups, social listening) to understand target audiences across outdoor, home, and humanitarian segments.
• Synthesize retail data, review analytics, competitive intelligence, and market trends into actionable insight briefs for the Sr. Brand Manager and VP of Marketing.
• Build and maintain a competitive intelligence and category research library — tracking key competitors and emerging brands across the filtration, hydration, and outdoor categories, as well as broader industry trends and market shifts.
• Analyze Sales team feedback and retail buyer conversations to identify gaps in product positioning, messaging, or asset availability.
• Provide the Sales team with data-driven talking points, market sizing, and consumer trend summaries for buyer presentations and sell-in meetings.
• Partner with Product Development on consumer testing and product-market fit research for the innovation pipeline.

Marketing Operations & Dashboards

• Build and maintain marketing performance dashboards that track campaign effectiveness, asset utilization, request volume, and turnaround times.
• Manage the marketing budget tracker in partnership with the VP of Marketing — consolidating spending across campaigns, vendors, and initiatives.
• Own the marketing tech stack administration (Asana, DAM, analytics tools) and ensure the team has the systems to work efficiently.
• Document and continuously improve marketing processes to build institutional knowledge that survives team changes.

Sales Enablement & Partnership

• Build and maintain a sales enablement library: sell sheets, competitive battle cards, buyer presentations, product one-pagers, and trade show materials.
• Ensure every Sales team member has current, channel-appropriate materials for their accounts (Outdoor, Mass Retail, Amazon, International, Institutional).
• Coordinate with the Sr. Brand Manager and PMS to ensure launch kits include all sales-facing deliverables.
• Track Sales team satisfaction with marketing support and use feedback to improve processes and asset quality. Equally, ensure the Sales team is properly briefing and providing all necessary information to Creative and Marketing for each request — and follow up with the appropriate parties when information is missing or incomplete.

What We’re Looking For

• Exceptionally organized with a systems-thinking mindset — you build processes, not just to-do lists.
• Strong interpersonal skills: you’re the person everyone wants to work with because you make their job easier.
• Data-curious: comfortable pulling insights from retail data, surveys, reviews, and competitive research.
• Experience working at the intersection of marketing and sales in a consumer brand.
• Project management mindset: experienced in managing multiple workstreams, creative pipelines, and cross-functional timelines simultaneously.
• Passion for sustainability and social impact.
• Calm under pressure — can manage competing priorities from multiple stakeholders without losing quality.

Education

• 3–6 years of experience in marketing operations, brand operations, project management, or marketing coordination at a consumer brand.
• Experience with consumer research methodologies (surveys, focus groups, social listening, retail analytics).
• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or related field.
• Proficient in project management tools (Asana preferred), Zoom, Google Suite, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook.
• Experience marketing dashboards, or business intelligence tools is a plus.

Essential Physical Demands and Typical Working Conditions

Physical demands include bending, carrying, pushing-pulling, reaching, sitting, standing, walking and extremes of temperature and humidity, as well as travel between physical locations. Hazards include stairs and communicable diseases.