Category Growth Manager, HBW Massage and Maintenance

About the role :

Groupon is seeking a Category Growth Manager who will own the category strategy and revenue enablement for Massage and Maintenance L3s. Define what “good” looks like through category playbooks, control shopping list execution and deal productivity, drive go-to-market initiatives for high-AOV and emerging services, and ensure cross-functional alignment between planned inventory, merchandising, campaigns, and actual performance.

This is a senior, hands-on role requiring flexibility between strategic category development and tactical execution, with deep category expertise and curiosity to identify what drives performance.

 

North Star :

Own and scale the Massage & Maintenance categories by defining clear success standards, ensuring disciplined production and deal quality, and driving revenue growth through portfolio expansion, GTM excellence, and cross-functional execution alignment.

 

What You’ll Do :

 

1. Category Intelligence & Standards

What you own:

• Develop cross-functional category playbooks defining success standards from target group upwards for Massage & Maintenance.
• Set minimum inventory requirements per metropolitan area: which services must be live, merchant counts, and quality benchmarks.
• Monitor competitor positioning and adjust category frameworks quarterly.

How you collaborate:

• Consult with Sales, Product, Ops, and Finance on category-specific strategic decisions.
• Inform day-to-day execution teams on category standards, requirements, and performance expectations.
• Serve as subject matter expert and advocate for Massage & Maintenance categories.

2. Revenue Enablement

Portfolio Expansion (Locations & Services):

• Support Local and Mid-Market teams with portfolio expansion initiatives.
• Provide category expertise on location and service expansion opportunities during QBRs with clients.
• When called upon, define criteria for which services to add.

High-AOV Service Expansion & GTM:

• Drive go-to-market strategy for high-AOV services: pricing, approvals, target lists, account approval, and opportunity pre-qualification.
• Define what qualifies as high-AOV for categories (e.g., couples massage $180–300, balayage $200–375, premium facials $150–350).

Emerging Services GTM:

• Drive go-to-market strategy for emerging services (e.g., sports massage, men’s grooming, specialty wellness).
• Own pricing, approvals, target lists, account approval criteria, and opportunity pre-qualification frameworks.
• Coordinate with Legal on vetting of merchants and new service due diligence before rollout.
• Analyze emerging service performance and identify growth opportunities.

3. Shopping List & Production Control

What you own:

• Own shopping list requirements for Massage & Maintenance categories.
• Define which services must be live per market and category.
• Control productivity output: monitor what sales teams are closing versus shopping list requirements.
• Monitor deal structures to ensure compliance with category deal charters.

Performance Alignment:

• Ensure shopping lists, actual production, merchandising, and marketing campaigns are aligned.
• Identify deviations between planned inventory and actual execution.
• Propose corrective measures and own cross-functional implementation of fixes.
• Track conversion, deal rating, and refund performance by service type.

4. Merchandising & Campaign Coordination

What you own:

• Define quarterly campaign requirements with Market Managers and Marketing for Massage & Maintenance.
• Ensure adequate inventory availability for seasonal campaigns (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, holiday gifting, etc.).
• Coordinate campaign timing with deal launches and merchant availability.
• Monitor campaign performance and recommend adjustments.

5. Customer Experience & Deal Quality

Collaborate with Product & Global Ops:

• Improve deal presentation to customers: imagery, descriptions, service clarity.
• Index on customer experience enhancements to improve conversion rates.
• Work on initiatives to improve deal ratings and reduce refunds.
• Test and implement improvements to customer journey for Massage & Maintenance.

Collaborate with Market Managers:

• Manage inventory quality: monitor deal ratings and customer feedback.
• Review and restructure deals with low ratings or high refund rates.
• Recommend deal take-downs when quality cannot be improved.
• Work on merchant improvement programs for underperforming deals.

 

What You Bring : 

Required Experience

• 5+ years in category management, commercial strategy, or marketplace operations within e-commerce, services marketplaces, or consulting.
• Experience in beauty, wellness, spa, or similar service verticals strongly preferred.
• Proven ability to flex between strategic planning and hands-on tactical execution.

Technical & Analytical Skills

• Advanced Excel proficiency (financial modeling, complex analysis).
• Experience with Tableau or Salesforce preferred.
• Comfortable with deal structuring, pricing strategy, and margin analysis.
• Comfort leveraging AI tools (e.g., generative AI, data analysis assistants) to accelerate research, pattern detection, and decision-making.
• Ability to translate AI insights into concrete commercial or operational actions.

  

Who You Are : 

• Category expert: You rapidly become the undisputed expert through curiosity and deep learning.
• Data-driven: You analyze performance, identify root causes, and propose evidence-based solutions.
• Strong cross-functional coordinator: You align multiple teams toward shared execution goals.
• Quality-obsessed: You care deeply about deal quality, customer experience, and merchant satisfaction.
• Hands-on executor: You don’t just strategize — you implement, monitor, and fix.

How We Operate

At Groupon, we're building a culture of extreme ownership, speed, impact, simplicity, and discipline. These aren't aspirational values - they're how we expect everyone to show up every day:

Extreme Ownership – One owner per outcome, no passengers, no excuses. We avoid accountability theater; we don't blame teams or create shared ownership that diffuses responsibility. When something goes wrong, we look in the mirror first. We escalate early, make trade-offs explicit, and ensure everyone knows who owns what.

Speed Over Comfort – We ship fast and learn faster. Perfect is too slow. We make fast, reversible decisions, normalize iteration, encourage early demos and prototypes, and admit mistakes openly. Bureaucracy and endless debate are the enemy. We clear bottlenecks and accelerate decisions across functions.

Impact Obsessed – We focus only on what moves the metrics that matter. We set metric-first goals, direct effort to high-value work, avoid feel-good activity, and use data and customer/merchant stories to guide decisions. We don't confuse effort with impact or tolerate low-ROI work that erodes trust. We drive team ROI and raise the quality bar by prioritizing ruthlessly.

Simplify to Scale – Complexity kills; simplicity scales. We build lean, scalable processes, remove noise, champion clarity and efficient ways of working. We drive cross-org simplification, push automation and tooling, question every layer, and ensure systems work for diverse voices - especially those closest to customers and merchants.

Disciplined – We do more with less; constraints breed creativity. We make ROI-based decisions, enforce resource discipline, set clear priorities, make durable decisions, and uphold integrity in data and commitments. We use constraints to drive innovation, build efficient operating rhythms, lift team productivity, and protect trust in trade-offs. We prioritize long-term value and create organizational leverage that scales efficiently.

 

In This Role, These Principles Mean : 

• You own category outcomes end-to-end — from standards to execution gaps.
• You ship structured improvements quickly and refine based on performance data.
• You eliminate low-quality inventory and focus only on what drives sustainable revenue.
• You simplify category frameworks and remove friction between Sales, Marketing, and Ops.
• You use data and AI to make category performance predictable — not reactive.

 

How We Measure Your Success : 

• Revenue growth and portfolio expansion within Massage & Maintenance categories.
• Shopping list compliance and production alignment across markets.
• Improvement in deal quality metrics (conversion rate, deal rating, refund rate).
• Successful execution of high-AOV and emerging service GTM initiatives.
• Cross-functional alignment between planned inventory, merchandising, and campaign performance.

Location:   Downtown Chicago (Hybrid)

Salary Range: $75k—$100k + bonus

Benefits: Medical, Dental, Vision, EAP, 401(k) Match, ESPP, Life and Disability Insurance, FSAs, and more