Change & GTM Manager, Direct-to-Consumer

Overview

You're managing go-to-market execution and change initiatives for PlayStation's direct-to-consumer business. This means you're coordinating cross-functional teams (product, marketing, sales operations, legal, finance) to launch new D2C offerings, optimize existing channels, and help a traditionally B2B2C organization adapt to selling directly to gamers. You report into the D2C commercial development team and spend most of your time in planning meetings, building project timelines, and getting alignment across siloed departments.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public (Sony subsidiary)

Size: 8,171 employees globally

Growth: Mature organization expanding D2C capabilities. PlayStation has dominated console gaming for decades but is now investing heavily in digital storefronts, subscriptions (PlayStation Plus), and direct relationships with players vs. relying solely on retail partners like GameStop and Best Buy.

Market Position: Category leader in console gaming competing with Xbox and Nintendo. The D2C push is about capturing more margin and customer data that currently sits with retailers.

GTM Reality

What "GTM" Means Here: This isn't traditional sales GTM—it's commercial operations for D2C initiatives. Think: launching a new PlayStation Direct feature, rolling out a subscription tier change, optimizing the digital storefront checkout flow, or expanding D2C into new regions.

Your Stakeholders:

• Product teams building the D2C platforms (PlayStation Store, PlayStation Direct site)
• Marketing teams running campaigns to drive traffic
• Regional commercial teams in different markets
• Legal/compliance (especially for payments, data privacy)
• Finance (revenue recognition, forecasting)
• Customer service teams handling D2C support

Reality Check: PlayStation is a massive, matrixed organization. Getting alignment across regions (Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific) and functions takes months. You're not making decisions—you're facilitating them and making sure launches don't fall apart.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Meetings/Alignment (45%) | Project Planning (30%) | Reporting/Analysis (15%) | Firefighting (10%)

Key Activities

• Building GTM Plans: You create project plans for new D2C launches (e.g., new payment method, new subscription offering, regional expansion). This means timelines, owner assignments, dependency mapping, risk identification. You're in PowerPoint and Smartsheet constantly.

• Running Cross-Functional Syncs: You lead weekly or bi-weekly status meetings with 8-15 people from different teams. You're chasing updates, escalating blockers, and trying to keep everyone aligned on priorities. A lot of "Let's take that offline" and "Can you send me that deck by EOD?"

• Change Management: When new processes roll out (e.g., new way to handle D2C customer refunds, new CRM for tracking customer interactions), you create training materials, run enablement sessions, and track adoption. You measure things like "% of regional teams using new dashboard" and "time to complete new workflow."

• Performance Reporting: You build dashboards and decks showing D2C metrics (conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value) and GTM initiative progress. You present these to senior leadership monthly or quarterly. If numbers are off, you diagnose why and propose fixes.

• Firefighting Launches: When a launch goes sideways (payment system breaks, regional team wasn't trained, legal flags a compliance issue last-minute), you coordinate the response. This means long Slack threads at odd hours and emergency syncs.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Matrix Hell: You have no direct authority over most people you work with. Everything requires influence, negotiation, and escalation. If engineering says a feature will take 6 months and marketing wants it in 2, you're stuck mediating.

• Slow Decision-Making: PlayStation is a huge, risk-averse organization. Even small changes require multiple approval layers. Legal and compliance reviews can add weeks. You'll spend a lot of time waiting.

• Ambiguous Success Metrics: "Change management" outcomes are fuzzy. Did the training work? Are teams adopting the new process? Success is often subjective and depends on executive perception.

• Global Complexity: What works in the US doesn't work in Japan or Europe. Payment preferences, regulatory requirements, and customer expectations vary wildly. You're constantly adapting plans for regional nuances.

What Success Looks Like

• You deliver 3-4 major GTM initiatives per year on time and without major issues (no customer-facing bugs, no compliance problems, regional teams actually use the new tools).
• Adoption metrics hit targets (e.g., 80% of regional teams trained on new process within 60 days).
• Senior leaders stop asking "Why is this taking so long?" and start asking "What's next?"

Who You're Working With

Internal Stakeholders (Your "Customers"):

• Regional Commercial Leads: Directors managing D2C revenue in Americas, EMEA, APAC. They care about hitting their numbers and not breaking what's already working.
• Product Managers: Building PlayStation Store, PlayStation Direct. They care about feature prioritization and engineering capacity.
• Marketing Teams: Running campaigns to drive D2C traffic. They care about creative assets, messaging, and performance data.
• Finance/Analytics: Forecasting D2C revenue. They care about data accuracy and clear attribution.

What They Care About:

• "Will this launch hurt my Q3 numbers?"
• "How much engineering time does this require?"
• "Do I need to hire more customer service reps to support this?"
• "What's the ROI and when do we see it?"

Requirements

• 5+ years in GTM strategy, operations, or program management (ideally in tech, gaming, or D2C e-commerce)
• Experience managing cross-functional projects with multiple stakeholders and dependencies
• Strong project management skills—you live in Gantt charts, RACI matrices, and status decks
• Comfort with ambiguity and navigating large, matrixed organizations
• Data fluency—you can pull insights from analytics tools and translate them into action plans
• Change management experience—you've rolled out new processes/tools and gotten people to actually use them
• Executive communication skills—you can distill complex projects into crisp executive summaries
• Bachelor's degree required; MBA or equivalent experience preferred