Product Operations Lead
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: Holborn Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1N 2HT
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 13 June 2025
Requisition ID: 30665224
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.
Division/Department
Sainsbury’s Tech
Location
Home and various UK locations
Reporting to
Product Operations Manager
In a nutshell
Partner closely with the Product teams, helping to drive our Product centric technology organisation. Across the external technology industry, Product Operations has grown significantly, acknowledged as a key emerging capability, and Sainsbury’s has identified the need to significantly invest in this skill to ensure cross functional product teams work effectively and efficiently, driving significant business and customer value.
Within Sainsburys, Product Operations facilitates planning activities across multiple vertical product teams; accountable for future horizon planning, roadmap planning and portfolio planning. The Product Operations Lead will help build capabilities to see how products are performing and make informed roadmap decisions. The Product Operations function will also develop and manage the tools the product team use, and analyse customer and colleague feedback.
What I am accountable for
- Partner closely with product and engineering teams, to facilitate prioritising a 3-year portfolio.
- Support joined up portfolio prioritisation, planning and visualisation so that portfolio priorities are optimised as a whole against our strategic objectives (Invest to Protect, Invest for Next Level and Invest to Compete)
- Ensure that product have the tools in place to help the product management organisation to operate efficiently.
- Embed a capability and culture where we measure the value of what Technology delivers. Use that capability to review and challenge how we get better value from the cash we deploy.
- Create an environment of learning, transparency, and high technical standards, to support effective and joined up decision making across CTO and CPO.
- Communicate clearly and convincingly with Product leaders, ensuring that they are appropriately engaged with the capabilities and work being performed by the Product Operations team
- Help support a visible single source of truth in relation to portfolio objectives, work initiatives, and reporting, enabling a consistent, transparent, and quantitative basis for decision-making.
- Work with data and analytics to provide product with data and analytical capability to make effective prioritisation decisions.
What I need to know
Essential
- Awareness of agile values, principles, practices and associated approaches to financial change allocation and portfolio management; knowledge and a bias towards agile and value management governance.
- Awareness and understanding of economic models of prioritisation, including cost of delay; funding for innovation and experimentation and continuous improvement.
- Experience of applying techniques and skills in effective portfolio management through data management, presentation and reporting
- Analytical, logical and critical thinker, confident numerically; thoughtful and impactful use of data: able to convert complex data and simplify the complex while sharing a story.
- Evidence of proactive production of insightful divisional reporting and dashboard, responding to changing demands and anticipating stakeholder needs.
- Skilled in communication and influencing within a team and across the organisation, coupled with strong presentation and facilitation skills and proven ability to quickly gain the confidence of the business and colleagues
Desirable
- Experience using Product Management Tools to help Product teams to operate efficiently.
- Experience in Product Operations / Portfolio Management in a fast-paced retail environment
What I need to show
- Excellent collaboration across multiple technical and business stakeholders
- Ability to successfully partner, coach & provide regular feedback with colleagues, demonstrating levels of empathy, awareness, emotional intelligence traits and an ability to unlock opportunity through coaching and mentoring
- Leadership skills, enabling teams to perform at their best by ensuring that business outcomes are clearly understood, and empowering teams to deliver against these
- Our Valued Behaviours are our common DNA that every colleague should live by and provide the benchmark for how we deliver our goals/individual contribution, and how we relate to other colleagues in the organisation.
- Own it
- Do what you say you’ll do
- Don’t walk past a problem
- Make it better
- Improve things for your customer
- Spot opportunities to simplify
- Be human
- Walk in the shoes of your colleagues and customers
- Show care and respect to everyone
Support we will provide
- Support from the Heads of Product and the Heads of Engineering
- The wider Product Operations team
- Other supporting teams (in partnership): Finance, Agile Coaching, Delivery, Architecture, PMO and Tech Ops
- Sainsbury’s Tech communities of practice.
- Training and development materials and initiatives (both internal and external)
Date of last job evaluation
New role
Please note: This role profile is aimed at describing the core output that should be achieved in this role. It is not intended to include specific tasks, temporary activities or projects to recognise flexibility in a changing context.
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 10% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
