Director of Strategic Finance - Marketing - Groupon

Groupon invests heavily in marketing across paid channels each year, yet today the business cannot tell with confidence which of those dollars are growing the marketplace and which are subsidising behaviour that would happen anyway. This role builds the financial system that replaces last-click attribution and blended CAC with incrementality testing, cohort-level unit economics, and category-by-geo contribution margin views. When this hire is doing their job, the CMO and CFO are reallocating budget on evidence rather than averages, and the business can defend every dollar at scale or stop. 

Who you'll work with

You'll report to Rana Kashyap, CFO, based in NYC/Chicago. Your closest partner is the CMO, and you'll work daily with Marketing Leadership, FP&A leadership, and the BI and Data Science leads who feed the incrementality testing infrastructure. There are no direct reports today; the role is the demand-side finance owner as a senior individual contributor at Director level. The commercial team sits in Prague, Madrid, and remote EU cities, and the work runs at exec cadence: Weekly and Monthly Business Reviews are the main forum, and decisions land in 24 hours, not after a planning cycle. The CFO is in NYC/Chicago, so you'll need to run a working rhythm across a six-hour time gap and bring the financial narrative without daily over-the-shoulder oversight. The work also means disagreeing with senior commercial leaders in a public forum, with evidence in one hand and the credibility you've built in the other. Early on, some teams will read you as a gatekeeper before they read you as a partner. If you need consensus before you commit to a number, or if calling "stop" on a senior leader's favourite channel doesn't feel possible to you, this is not the role.

What you'll be doing

• Owning the Demand Truth Model end-to-end: an integrated view linking customer segments, channels, surfaces, and P&L that the CMO and CFO use to make reallocation calls
• Moving the team from last-click attribution to incrementality: defining marginal ROI frameworks, setting channel hurdle rates, and running the holdouts and experiments that make the numbers defensible
• Standardising cohort-level LTV and CAC by channel, category, geography, and customer type, and shifting the narrative from cost-per-transaction to lifetime contribution margin
• Producing category- and geo-level contribution margin views that classify the portfolio into Invest, Maintain, or Fix/Exit, and partnering with Pricing and Promotions to separate incremental demand from subsidised behaviour
• Leading the financial narrative in Weekly and Monthly Business Reviews, owning unified revenue monitoring, and turning the signals from those reviews into reallocation decisions within 24 hours
• Building the systems and playbooks the wider team can run, so the demand finance function scales without you being the bottleneck on every analysis

What success looks like

Day 30: You've aligned the business on the metric definitions that matter (especially new vs returning), mapped the current reporting stack and data gaps, and stood up the WBR narrative template. Demand Truth Model v0 and incrementality roadmap v0 are outlined. You've established a working rhythm with the CMO and the product leaders.

Day 60: The WBR is running off your narrative. The first incrementality test is in design with BI and Data Science partners. New vs returning reporting is in pilot for at least one major channel. You're sparring with the CMO on the first reallocation hypothesis backed by your model.

Day 90: Demand Truth Model v1 is live for the top channels and cohorts. New vs returning reporting is live for major channels. The first category and geo contribution margin view is published for material segments. The incrementality roadmap is published with first tests designed and scheduled. Unified revenue monitoring is owned by finance with alert routing and low-noise dashboards. At least one material budget reallocation has been made on the strength of your evidence.

What this role demands

You can demonstrably:

• Move a team beyond last-click attribution to incrementality, designing the holdouts or geo tests yourself and producing the recommendation a CMO acted on
• Build a cohort-level unit economics model from raw transactional data, producing LTV and CAC by channel, category, geography, and customer type, with the assumptions and confidence intervals visible
• Move budget away from a channel a senior stakeholder is attached to, with the evidence and the narrative to defend it, and take the call to the CFO without flinching
• Build a framework or playbook that scaled beyond you (a measurement system, a planning architecture, or an operating cadence), and explain why it stuck
• Use AI tools as a daily accelerant for analysis, modelling, and documentation, and show the workflows you've actually built rather than the tools you've tried

How we operate

We hire for how people work, not just what they can do. The Operating Principles most relevant to this role:

• Extreme Ownership: Your name is on the demand finance truth. You bring the recommendation with the evidence behind it, and when a reallocation goes wrong you bring the recovery plan, not just the diagnosis.
• Disciplined: Causality over correlation. You set the hurdle rates, hold the line on incrementality standards, and refuse to dress correlation up as proof when the test design didn't earn it.
• Impact Obsessed: You measure success in incremental contribution margin and reallocated capital, not in models built or decks shared. If a model isn't changing a decision, you cut it.