Head of Product - Martech & Personalisation

About the Martech & Personalisation domain

Our ambition is to deliver the most personalised and relevant customer experience in UK retail. Marketing technology and personalisation capabilities are central to that ambition: they determine how we understand and engage our customers, how we activate relevant offers and recommendations, and how connected experiences across our channels support loyalty and growth.

As Head of Product for Martech & Personalisation, you’ll provide end-to-end product leadership across a growing, strategically important portfolio. You’ll partner with peers to define a business strategy, and turn it in to a clear product vision, capability model, prioritised roadmap and investment plan. Along the way you’ll need to align engineering, data science, marketing, Nectar, digital and commercial stakeholders around a shared direction.

The portfolio includes the setting the product strategy for where and how we can transform our martech estate; the scaling of personalisation as a horizontal capability; the use of customer data and orchestration; multi-channel activation and messaging; product leadership required across major change initiatives. You’ll also help shape the future operating model across our business and technology teams, alongside managing ongoing supplier and technology choices.

This fixed-term contract grows our product leadership at a pivotal point in our strategy cycle. We’re looking for a product leader with a demonstrable background in marketing and personalisation technology who can bring clarity to complex choices, establish measurable outcomes, sequence investment and delivery, and build a high-performing product organisation around a coherent long-term direction.

In Sainsbury’s Tech, we power the UK’s number 1 multi-channel, multi-brand retailer. Our Product teams are made up of inspired and multi-discipline individuals who are empowered to solve hard problems in ways our customers and colleagues love and which serve the needs of our business.

Heads of Product play a critical leadership role at Sainsbury’s and are expected to create, drive and deliver their vision for their relevant product domain to support our overall business strategy.

To land that, this role needs to partner closely with peers and senior stakeholders and be comfortable defining and interpreting relevant metrics to prioritise roadmaps, supporting and challenging the team and business partners. Commercially astute, you’ll balance return on investment against desirability, viability, feasibility and longevity. You’ll be comfortable working at the pace a retail business requires while addressing simplification, scalability, stability, capacity and legacy.

As a leader, we want you to love coaching and developing your team, setting stretching goals and giving open, honest and supportive feedback to help colleagues realise their full potential. You’ll thrive on delivering through your wider team.

• Own and evolve the Product vision, strategy and capability model for Martech & Personalisation
• Partner with peers in tech and business to move from a high level strategy into a credible, prioritised roadmap that aligns customer outcomes, commercial value, technology choices and delivery capacity
• Lead and coach the wider Product team to deliver their product visions and achieve strategic business goals
• Define measurable outcomes and success metrics spanning marketing, personalisation, operational efficiency and business performance
• Help shape the future operating model and decision rights across marketing, technology, digital and data teams
• Refine and optimise investment within defined capital, leading through priority and capacity contention across the portfolio
• Lead product governance, planning, portfolio reviews and cross-functional prioritisation, escalating trade-offs where needed
• Support business cases, investment assessments, value estimation, funding decisions and benefits realisation
• Assess the martech ecosystem, market trends and vendor landscape, contributing to platform evaluations, supplier discussions and operating-model decisions
• Cultivate, develop and maintain effective third-party supplier relationships where relevant

• Champion Martech & Personalisation, clearly communicating the customer experience, business value, capabilities and long-term vision to different audiences
• Create alignment between business objectives, product initiatives, investment choices and delivery activity
• Lead prioritisation and articulate trade-off decisions clearly to senior stakeholders to maximise value and return on investment
• Maintain clear near-term roadmaps and full-year backlogs, actively managing progress, dependencies, risks and blockers
• Build strong partnerships with Engineering, Data Science, Architecture, Experience Design, Marketing, Customer, Digital, Finance and Commercial stakeholders
• Ensure customer-facing propositions and the technology built to enable them evolve as one connected portfolio
• Develop a strong Product Management team, setting high standards for outcome ownership, product discipline and evidence-led decision making
• Improve the Martech product operating model, governance processes and decision-making frameworks
• Create a more focused and better-governed portfolio, with capabilities delivered in the right sequence and engineering investment clearly prioritised
• Contribute to and lead within our Product Community of Practice

• Product leadership experience across Martech, with demonstrable experience of MDMs, CDPs, CRMs, mutli-channel orchestration, content production and 3rd party vendors sought
• An understanding of AI and machine-learning based personalisation highly desirable
• A strong track record of translating business strategy into product vision, capability models, roadmaps and measurable outcomes – and then delivering
• Strong commercial acumen, using return on investment, customer value, market context and product evidence to inform prioritisation
• Experience leading complex transformation across multiple products, platforms and teams, including legacy simplification and modernisation
• Data-driven decision making, using product, customer and business metrics to prioritise effectively and demonstrate value
• Strong product management discipline across the product lifecycle, with a focus on outcomes over outputs
• Experience selecting, managing and partnering with technology suppliers and third parties
• Technical curiosity and sufficient depth to translate customer and business needs into clear technology outcomes and engage credibly in platform and architecture choices
• Strong leadership, coaching and team-development experience, both directly and cross-functionally
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management and influencing skills at senior levels
• The ability to create clarity, alignment and momentum in a complex and evolving environment
   

We are committed to making Tech a place where people love to work where diverse and engaged team make a purposeful contribution. Sainsbury’s is committed to being the most inclusive retailer, and flexible working including job sharing is welcomed wherever possible. In Tech we welcome such conversations and are proud to champion a diverse and inclusive culture.

We’ve adopted a hybrid model, coming together for collaboration and to get to know each other better. We’re working flexibly – have a chat with us about what you need.

If you’ve read this far but are not 100% sure you’re there with your experience, still get in touch. The skills you do have are often more transferrable than you think ??. Equally with such a large and growing tech team, it might be there’s something else that could suit you better. If you’d like to find out more head to Sainsbury's DTD.

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