Business Innovation Manager

About us:

The American Forest Foundation (AFF) unlocks the power of family forests as a climate solution while helping thousands of landowners care for their land and improve forest health. Through its Family Forest Carbon Program, AFF expands access to the voluntary carbon market for family forest owners from all walks of life while producing high quality forest carbon credits to help companies reach their net zero goals. The organization’s strategic direction seeks to enable family forests to capture and store one billion tonnes of carbon by 2050.

We do not do this alone. AFF works across a broad coalition of conservation partners, corporations, and policymakers to equip family forest owners with financial and technical support to implement sustainable forest management practices on their lands and activate their forests as a critical tool in the fight against climate change.

AFF is in a mode of complex problem solving and rapid iteration. All teams at AFF are working to discover solutions to the planet’s most pressing climate issues through developing and iterating viable and scalable models for impact. AFF is driven by values of our shared purpose, measurable and verifiable results, and learning for continuous improvement to tackle big conservation challenges.

About the Role: 

Pursuing our ambitious strategy requires continuous improvement and innovation across all parts of the organization. This includes new approaches to how we do our work, new opportunities for creating impact, and new structures and business models for enabling the outcomes. As a Business Innovation Manager, you will be directly engaging in projects across multiple teams, identifying and resolving impediments in the work, and supporting business development in new opportunity areas. You will report directly to the EVP of Business Innovation and will support the oversight of innovation priorities across a broad cross team portfolio. This role is part project management, part analysis, and part discovery. We are seeking someone who is eager to explore, can roll up their sleeves to jump in where needed, and is excited to work in the dynamic emerging market for nature-based climate solutions. 

Responsibilities: 

• Work with EVP of Business Innovation to manage Agile team rituals, track progress on priorities, and surface impediments for quick resolution;
• Support the Director of Product Development, Director of Climate Finance, and others in research for feasibility assessment of new opportunity areas;
• Prepare implementation and change management plans;
• Complete reporting to funders and investors;
• Arrange and participate in customer and market discovery;
• General project management.

Candidate Requirements:

• Relevant post-secondary studies in business management, finance, community development, and/or conservation strategy
• Direct experience in entrepreneurship or working inside of a new and growing business;
• Familiarity with carbon projects and market mechanisms preferred;
• Strong written and spoken communication; 
• Strong interpersonal skills for collaborating across diverse audiences;
• Preference for experience in Agile management systems and ideally familiar with the role of Scrum Master;
• Ability to research and synthesize technical and scientific articles, standards, and protocols;
• General financial literacy and understanding of core business finance concepts (e.g. cost of goods, net margin, rate of return, interest rate, net present value);
• Proficient with Excel;
• Experience and comfort in learning to use a variety of cloud-based business tools including Office 365, Zoom, Slack, HubSpot, NetSuite, Favro (like Jira, Trello, etc…)

Core Competencies: 

• Agility – Thriving in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments by anticipating and responding to changes with swift, focused and flexible actions.
• Collaborating with Others – Working together with others in a cooperative and supportive manner to achieve shared goals.
• Ensuring Accountability – Holding yourself and others to high standards of accountability, creating an infrastructure and transparent organization culture that supports and measures personal and organizational responsibility and accountability.
• Problem Solving – Identifying problems and the solutions to them. Your contributions and leadership will be appreciated. Our staff is passionate, dedicated and good at what they do, and will be deeply grateful for your efforts to create and preserve an environment that is both fun and fair.

 Job Function Competencies: 

• Business Analysis - Identifying, investigating, and evaluating options for improving business systems, defining requirements, and ensuring the effective use of information technology to meet the needs of the business.
• Project Management - Planning, implementing, monitoring, and completing projects while ensuring effective management of scope, resources, time, cost, quality, risk, and communications.
• Entrepreneurial Mindset - Seeking opportunities and risks to innovate and create new value for consumers; effecting change and executing new vision with tenacity and optimism.
• Organizational Awareness - Understanding the workings, structure, culture, and distribution of power within and beyond the organization; utilizing this understanding to solve problems and achieve desired outcomes.

 What’s attractive to the right candidate:

• You have the unique and exciting opportunity to collaborate with amazing colleagues, partners and landowners to help connect forest landowners with technical and financial assistance to better steward their land and achieve vital landscape-scale conservation impacts. 
• Your contributions and leadership will be appreciated. Our staff is enthusiastic, dedicated and good at what they do, and will be deeply grateful for your efforts to create and preserve an environment that is both fun and fair.
• We offer a flexible work environment that respects your life outside of work.
• Salary is commensurate with experience.
• AFF offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package. 

Contact us to apply:

We know there are great candidates who may not check all these boxes, and we also know you might bring important skills that we haven’t considered. If that applies to you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself. 

We are committed to creating a diverse work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status or any other basis protected by law.