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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Director

๐Ÿ’ฐ $ - $

DigitalWebProductMarketingLeadership

๐ŸŽฏ Role Definition

The Web Director is a senior, cross-functional leader responsible for owning the website and related digital experiences end-to-end. This role sets the web strategy and roadmap, directs UX and content governance, partners with engineering and marketing to deliver measurable conversions, and leads the web team and external vendors to optimize site performance, accessibility, search visibility, and online revenue. The ideal candidate combines product-thinking, technical fluency, and people leadership to scale customer-focused, secure, and high-performing web platforms.


๐Ÿ“ˆ Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Product Manager โ€” Digital/Web
  • Head of UX / UX Director
  • Digital Marketing Director / SEO Lead

Advancement To:

  • VP of Digital Experience
  • Chief Digital Officer (CDO)
  • Head of Product / Head of Online

Lateral Moves:

  • Director of Eโ€‘commerce
  • Director of Product Management (web platforms)
  • Director of Customer Experience (CX)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop and communicate a multi-year web strategy and product roadmap that aligns with company growth goals, brand positioning, and omnichannel marketing initiatives.
  • Own end-to-end website delivery: requirements definition, prioritization, release planning, QA, launch coordination, and post-launch measurement across desktop, mobile, and app webviews.
  • Lead and mentor a multidisciplinary web team (product managers, UX/UI designers, front-end developers, content strategists, SEO specialists, QA) to deliver high-quality digital experiences and continuous improvement.
  • Manage the website CMS strategy and operations (selection, architecture, governance, implementation, upgrades, integrations) to enable scalable content workflows and rapid time-to-market.
  • Set and track key web KPIs (traffic, organic search rank, conversion rates, average order value, bounce rate, engagement, page speed) and use data-driven insights to prioritize product and UX changes.
  • Architect information architecture and content models that improve findability, navigation, and conversion across complex content and product catalogs.
  • Direct the UX/UI design process, ensuring customer-centric flows, responsive design, accessibility (WCAG compliance), and visual consistency with brand guidelines.
  • Own SEO strategy and technical SEO execution (site structure, schema, canonicalization, hreflang, crawl budget) in partnership with content marketing and engineering teams.
  • Lead conversion rate optimization (CRO) programs: hypothesis generation, A/B and multivariate testing, experimentation roadmaps, and scaling of winning experiences.
  • Collaborate with engineering to define front-end architecture, performance budgets, modern JavaScript frameworks, API contracts, and CI/CD processes to maintain platform stability and speed.
  • Manage integrations with analytics, tag management, personalization engines, CRM, PIM, OMS, payment gateways, and third-party marketing platforms to enable measurement and personalization.
  • Oversee site reliability, security, hosting and CDN strategy, and compliance with privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA), working closely with IT/security teams.
  • Control web budget, procurement, vendor selection and management (digital agencies, development partners, CDN, testing platforms), and ensure SLAs and ROI.
  • Drive personalization and dynamic content initiatives using segmentation, server/client-side personalization, and recommendation engines to increase engagement and lifetime value.
  • Coordinate large-scale digital launches and promotions by orchestrating cross-functional teams (marketing, product, legal, operations) and ensuring readiness checks and rollback plans.
  • Implement web analytics and attribution frameworks (GA4, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel), define measurement taxonomies, and ensure event instrumentation integrity for accurate reporting.
  • Champion accessibility, internationalization, and localization strategies to ensure equitable experiences for diverse audiences and optimized conversion across markets.
  • Define and enforce web content governance, editorial workflows, metadata standards, SEO-friendly copy guidelines, and taxonomy management to ensure consistency and discoverability.
  • Lead stakeholder management and executive reporting: translate technical tradeoffs into business outcomes, present roadmap and KPI trends, and secure alignment and investment.
  • Drive continuous performance optimization (core web vitals, image and resource optimization, caching strategies, code-splitting) to improve UX and organic search visibility.
  • Establish a culture of experimentation and continuous learning by creating playbooks for testing, analysis, and scaling of improvements.
  • Evaluate emerging web technologies (progressive web apps, headless CMS, edge computing, server-side rendering) and recommend adoption paths that deliver measurable business value.

Secondary Functions

  • Provide subject-matter expertise to sales and customer success on web capabilities, platform limits, and implementation timelines to support commercial opportunities.
  • Partner with marketing operations to ensure campaign landing pages, tracking, and post-click optimization meet conversion and reporting requirements.
  • Support accessibility remediation plans and work with internal and external auditors during accessibility testing and certification.
  • Collaborate with privacy and legal teams to implement consent management platforms (CMPs), data layer practices, and lawful data collection for personalization and analytics.
  • Mentor individual contributors through performance development plans, career coaching, and recruitment for high-impact roles on the web team.
  • Contribute to company-wide digital strategy initiatives, helping to translate corporate goals into prioritized web investments and technical requirements.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Web strategy and product management for enterprise websites and digital platforms.
  • Content Management Systems (CMS) expertise โ€” experience with Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, WordPress, Contentful, or similar headless and coupled CMS architectures.
  • Strong understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript fundamentals and modern front-end frameworks (React, Vue, Next.js) to effectively partner with engineering.
  • SEO and technical SEO proficiency: site architecture, schema markup, canonicalization, hreflang, XML sitemaps, and crawl optimization.
  • Web analytics and measurement: GA4, Adobe Analytics, full-funnel attribution, event tracking, dashboards and KPI reporting.
  • A/B testing and experimentation platforms (Optimizely, VWO, Google Optimize replacement tooling) and statistical testing knowledge.
  • Performance optimization: Core Web Vitals, image optimization, lazy loading, caching, CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare), and server-side rendering strategies.
  • Accessibility standards and remediation (WCAG 2.1/2.2) and tools for testing and reporting.
  • Integration experience with APIs, CRMs (Salesforce), e-commerce platforms (Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce), PIMs, and marketing automation systems.
  • Tag management and data layer implementation: Google Tag Manager, Tealium, or similar TMS.
  • Cloud and deployment knowledge: AWS, Azure, CI/CD pipelines, and containerization concepts a plus.
  • Security and data privacy basics: GDPR/CCPA implications for tracking, cookies, and consent management.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic leadership: ability to create and sell a long-term vision and roadmap to executive stakeholders.
  • Cross-functional collaboration: proven success coordinating product, engineering, marketing, sales, legal and operations.
  • Data-driven decision making: comfortable with quantitative analysis, A/B test interpretation, and extracting insights from analytics.
  • Excellent communication and presentation skills โ€” able to translate technical tradeoffs into business impact.
  • Prioritization and resource allocation: focus on delivering highest-value outcomes under constraints.
  • People management and coaching: recruiting, developing, and retaining high-performing teams.
  • Vendor and contract negotiation skills with experience managing external agencies and technology providers.
  • Problem-solving and adaptability in ambiguous and fast-paced environments.
  • Customer empathy and UX sensibility to champion user-centered design choices.
  • Change management and stakeholder influence to drive adoption of new processes and platforms.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Media, Marketing, or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MBA, MS in Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, Digital Marketing) or equivalent work experience in lieu of advanced degree.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science / Software Engineering
  • Human-Computer Interaction / UX Design
  • Digital Marketing / Communications
  • Information Architecture / Library Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 7โ€“12+ years of progressive experience in digital product/web management, with at least 3โ€“5 years in a senior or director-level role.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years experience owning enterprise web platforms, a proven track record of driving organic traffic and conversion improvements, hands-on experience with CMS migrations/headless implementations, and managing teams of 8+ direct and indirect reports.