Senior Strategy & Operations Manager

ON THE HOUSEA gap that shouldn't existToilet paper is free in every bathroom. Period products aren't.3 in 5 Australian women have used tissues, toilet paper or socks because the product they needed wasn't there when they needed it. Not because it's expensive. Because nobody built the infrastructure to put it in front of her.At the same time, brands are spending more than ever to reach women, with worse results every year. $1 trillion a year on ads. Falling attention. Falling trust. Women control roughly 85% of household spending and most of that money is chasing them through channels they've learned to ignore.Two broken markets. Nobody had connected them.We did.

How it worksON THE HOUSE installs vending machines in high-traffic bathrooms that double as digital billboards.Brands pay to reach women in a zero-distraction, high-gratitude moment. Those ad dollars fund free, organic period products.Every interaction is a two-way exchange: she walks away with something free and useful, and brands walk away with brand lift, clear attribution, and a world-first kind of data: consented, transparent, verified, every time.We're already live in venues like Accor and Hyatt Hotels, Dendy Cinemas, Dreamworld, Village Roadshow, and Revelop Shopping Centres.We're working with iconic brands like Afterpay, Frontier Touring, 2XU, and Pillow Talk.And this is just the beginning.

The Role
Picture this. Eighteen months from now, you get to say you built the largest free period product network in the world.
When you joined there were 55 machines live. Now there are more than a thousand, dispensing 3.6 million free period products in that year alone. That happened because of you.
You owned the entire physical side of the company and you built the glue between every team inside it. You took one of the hardest questions in the business, what happens between a signed venue contract and a woman finding the product in the exact moment she needs it, every single time, and you designed the answer.
You set the vision and strategy for our operations team and then built it. You pulled in people from all walks of life who wanted to spend their time on something that matters. You built the training, then automated it, so the team could spend its time on the part only humans can do.
You worked with our tech team to build the software that sits between what happens in the backend and what happens in real life with a fleet spread across the country.
Nobody in the world is doing this. Period products in bathrooms exist, although not often, and someone always pays for them. We made it free for women and free for venues. There's no playbook to copy. You're the one who gets to build it.
Plenty of sharp people are building AI agents for software problems. Far fewer are working where AI meets the physical world. That intersection is where you get to play.
This is a build-from-scratch role reporting to the COO, with two direct reports today and a field team you'll shape and grow.
⏰ Start date: Immediately📍 Location: Melbourne, hybrid📆 Applications close: 30th August

What You'll OwnThe StrategyOwn the answer to how ON THE HOUSE gets from 55 machines to a thousand, and what has to be true operationally at every stage in between.Take the messiest question in the business and simplify it into something a team can run every day without you in the room.Own the economics of the physical network. Know what it costs to keep a machine live, and make that number better every quarter.
The GlueProduct: Be the internal product manager to work with our tech team on our internal management software that runs the fleet. You're the closest thing we'll have to a product manager for the tools your own team lives in.Process: Build AI-natively from day one. There's no legacy stack here to work around. Integrate tools together, chain multi-step workflows, and use AI to unlock what a small, sharp operations team can do.Cross-functional operations: Connect the functions that don't naturally talk to each other, venues, field, tech and ops, and make them operate as one.
The TeamLead our on-the-ground team, and build it. Set the vision, bring in the people, design how they're trained and grow, then automate the parts that shouldn't need a human.Grow two direct reports into leaders.Build a team people want to be part of, made up of people who want to spend their working life on something that matters.
If you're crushing it in six months: every machine in the fleet is live and stocked, the field team runs without you in the room, and you can tell us to the dollar what it costs to keep it that way.
What We're Looking ForWe're not precious about background. We're combining a lot of different specialties to build something that hasn't been built before. You could come from high-growth tech in operations and strategy, worked on a distributed fleet, led and built field service teams, or anything that involves complicated problem solving and operationalising it.
What we do care about:You've led people, and you were excellent at it. Not managed a function on paper. Actually built and run a team.You've built an operation from scratch, or rebuilt one that was broken. You haven't just inherited a machine that already worked.You simplify. You take something tangled and hand back something clean that other people can run.You think, then you do. Strategy without follow-through is a slide deck. Doing without thinking is chaos. We need both, in one person.You're not above the work. You'd get in the van and go to a site yourself if that's what it took to work out what's broken.You build with AI properly. Connecting tools, running multi-step agentic workflows, not just using it to draft text.You're based in Melbourne.
The kind of person you areOwns the whole machine: if something's broken, you don't wait for someone else to fix it. You work out why, and you own it end to end.Moves at speed: you'd rather ship something rough this week than something polished next month.Builds while it's live: nothing here is finished yet, including the plan. You're fine building it while it's running. It's where you thrive.Ignores how it's always been done: you don't ask how the industry does it, you ask what works.Stays sharp under pressure: you check the numbers before you make the call, and nothing rattles you when a plan changes fast.In eighteen months, if you want to stand in front of a fleet of a thousand machines and say you were the one who put them there, and that no woman went without period products in any of those venues, this is the role for you.
Want to apply for this role?📋 Fill in this short form and we'll reach out! (https://airtable.com/appeht6bnaioDN4IF/shrS3cYLsYg5f7giY)
📆 Applications close: 30th August