Senior Manager, YouTube Intelligence

Role Summary

The Senior Manager, YouTube Intelligence is the analytical and strategic lead responsible for turning content and platform data into creative/strategic decisions across Beast Industries’ entire YouTube channel ecosystem. Reporting to the Head of Virality, this role operates at the intersection of data analysis, platform expertise, and creative intuition, ensuring that every upload, thumbnail, title, and content decision is informed by rigorous performance insight.

This is a high-output player-coach role. The Senior Manager personally conducts deep analysis while directing a team of two Analysts, building the feedback loops between data, creative, and production that keep Beast’s channels at the top of YouTube. The mandate is not reporting for reporting’s sake, it is generating insights that measurably improve content performance.

Core Mandate

• Improve the performance of every new upload across Beast’s YouTube channels through data-driven creative decisions
• Improve overall channel health and growth trajectory across the entire YouTube portfolio (existing channels and possible new channels)
• Define and own the analytical framework that connects content performance to creative strategy
• Build the process and cadence through which analytics insights reach creative teams and translate into action
• Serve as a primary analytical voice in content and packaging decisions alongside creative leadership
• Proactively identify and bring innovative growth ideas, platform experiments, and emerging content opportunities to leadership. You don’t just report on what happened, but anticipate what should happen next

Primary Responsibilities

Content Performance Analysis & Creative Strategy

• Define the analytical framework for evaluating content performance across all Beast YouTube channels, establishing what metrics matter, how they relate to each other, and what “good” looks like for each channel and format
• Conduct deep post-mortem analysis on tentpole videos, underperformers, and breakout successes, translating findings into specific, actionable creative recommendations for packaging, ideation, and programming
• Identify patterns in clickability, watchability, and audience satisfaction that inform what content gets made, how it’s packaged, and when it’s published
• Present insights directly to channel leads and senior leadership, advising on creative changes and earning the trust to eventually direct them

Reporting Cadence & Performance Infrastructure

• Own the weekly performance reporting cadence across all channels, ensuring leadership has clear, timely visibility into what’s working and what isn’t
• Design and maintain roll-up reports that capture performance trends, content mix effectiveness, and channel growth trajectory
• Build and maintain dashboards and analysis workflows using AI tools, ensuring the team operates with maximum speed and analytical depth without requiring dedicated engineering support

Platform & Competitive Intelligence

• Monitor YouTube algorithm changes, feature rollouts, and platform-level shifts, translating them into strategic recommendations before they impact performance
• Track competitive performance across top-tier creators and emerging channels, identifying content trends, format innovations, and packaging strategies worth testing or defending against
• Conduct broader platform analysis across YouTube formats (long-form, Shorts, live streams, community posts) to inform where Beast should increase, reduce, or evolve its presence
• Proactively surface emerging content trends, viral format shifts, and growth opportunities with specific data to back them up. Operating as an early-warning system that keeps the team ahead of the curve rather than reacting to it

Creative Feedback Loop & Cross-Functional Coordination

• Build and maintain the structured feedback loop between analytics, ideation, thumbnail design, production, and editing, ensuring insights don’t sit in dashboards but are actively implemented across teams, with follow-through on adoption and measurable creative impact
• Partner with channel leads to inform programming strategy, content mix, and upload cadence based on performance data and audience behavior
• Coordinate directly with the thumbnail team, ideation team, and post-production to surface relevant data at the right stage of the content lifecycle

Team Leadership

• Direct and develop a team of two YouTube Intelligence Analysts, setting priorities, reviewing output quality, and building their ability to independently surface and present insights
• Establish workflows, templates, and standards that allow the team to operate at high velocity while maintaining analytical rigor

Ideal Candidate Profile

• You have deep, native-level fluency with YouTube as a platform. You understand the algorithm, the metrics that actually matter, and how content decisions translate into viewership outcomes. This likely comes from working directly with a top creator(s) or running a channel yourself
• You think in terms of clickability, watchability, and satisfaction, not just views. You can look at a thumbnail and a retention curve and connect the two
• You are highly proficient with spreadsheets and dashboards, comfortable with SQL, and able to build analytical workflows without relying on engineering teams to pull or structure data for you
• You are a power user of AI tools and actively use them to accelerate analysis, build automations, create visualizations, and increase your analytical output by an order of magnitude
• You can present complex analytical findings to creative leaders in a way that drives action, not confusion. 
• You know how to make data persuasive without oversimplifying it
• You have experience managing or directing junior analysts and can develop talent while maintaining high personal output
• You are obsessed with YouTube and genuinely excited by the challenge of keeping the biggest creator on the platform at #1

Success in This Role

• New uploads consistently improve in performance as a direct result of data-informed creative decisions
• Overall channel health and growth trajectory improve across the entire YouTube portfolio
• A clear, trusted feedback loop exists between data and creative that is followed consistently across channels
• The teams never fly blind, every upload has context, every trend is tracked, and no performance signal goes unnoticed
• You are consistently bringing innovative ideas, growth experiments, and data-backed opportunities to leadership, as well as driving their implementation across teams, not just flagging them
• AI tools are embedded into daily analytical workflows, making this team faster and more capable than traditional analytics functions