Job Description
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/Dept
Sainsbury’s Tech
Location
Various – majority Holborn (combined with home)
Reporting to
Head of Product
In a nutshell
At Sainsbury’s we believe that the customer should be at the heart of everything we do, which is why we have put them at the centre of our vision of being there for their customers whenever, wherever, and however they want, serving more of our customers more of the time. Within Sainsbury’s Tech we are one organisation, driving brilliant experiences across all our brands operating in agile teams and working seamlessly together to make the most of the exceptional knowledge, insight, and talent we have across the division. Our product teams are made up of inspired and multidiscipline individuals who are empowered to solve hard problems in ways our customers love and serves the needs of our business.
In your role as a Group Product Manager, you’ll manage a group of related but complex products directly and through your team of Product / Senior Product Managers, guiding the vision and working actively with multiple teams to make it come to life. You’ll ensure your group of products work seamlessly together, sharing efficiencies and expertise, with the ultimate customer always front of mind. You will have an infectious passion for your products, partnering engineering and architecture to define, deliver and iterate to find creative ways to deliver awesome experiences for our customers. You’re driven to build brilliant teams and bring out the best in others.
Sainsbury’s product teams work across Argos, the UK’s 3rd largest general merchandise retailer, Sainsbury’s, the UK’s 2nd largest grocery retailer, Nectar, the largest loyalty programme in the UK as well as Tu clothing, Sainsbury’s Bank and Argos Financial services.
We’re big and that's really exciting when you consider the volume of customers that see your work, but you’ll also ship lots of value to customers, and you’ll be able to learn and iterate quickly to get the best customer experience.
Specifically focusing on:
Serving millions of customers every day across hundreds of technology products for some of the largest brands in the UK, our integration provides a unique and extensive opportunity to transform the way in which we move data between our systems so that it gets to the right place at the right time in the right way. Working alongside Engineering and Architecture you’ll lead an integrations platform product team to build a strategy for utilising our strategic integration platform technologies. Together we will enhance service for our customers, deliver pace of change for the engineers using the platforms, while reducing cost.
What you need to do
As a Group Product Manager you will:
- Take accountability for end-to-end delivery – ensuring work is prioritised across your products and is in line with the agreed product goals and metrics. Make appropriate decisions on prioritisation trade-offs to ensure maximum value and return on capital is achieved at pace.
- Build highly collaborative relationships with engineering, architecture, other product teams, and third parties working together at all levels to solve problems for our customers.
- Anticipating risks and opportunities, responding to escalations at pace and coaching others to find solutions based on your expertise.
- Support communication and resolution of live product incidents and effectively prioritise, coordinate, and communicate the resolution of production issues (bugs).
- Monitor relevant industry trends and insights to engage both internal and external teams as appropriate to build shared understanding.
- Effectively lead a team of 3 Product / Senior Product Managers driving your team and their products towards the future through constructive challenge and thought leadership.
- Contribute to the product community, coaching more junior product colleagues and leading training interventions for new joiners.
- Generate energy and drive across stakeholders at all levels to drive consensus on the approach across divisions balancing requirements and expectations up to board sponsor level.
- Advocate for agile software development practices ensuring a good understanding of iterative value delivery.
- Champion and prioritise tech standards alongside product features in your and your team’s roadmaps explaining the merits to stakeholders.
What you need to know
- Proven track record of leading delivery of highly complex technology led change in cross-functional environments; you have shipped products at scale that customers and colleagues love.
- Strong level of awareness, interest, and understanding of integration platforms such as Kafka and API Management toolsets, and how to develop these so they work seamlessly for customers and colleagues.
- Ability to translate business goals, strategy, and market knowledge into a product roadmap that prioritises delivery of value and enables business agility.
- A solid grounding in technical expertise, comfortable having technical discussions with the teams.
- Solid understanding of commercial landscape.
What you need to show
- You’re a proven product manager with a flair for creative problem solving and enthusiasm for delivering change through people and technology.
- You set a high bar for your own contributions and people you work with.
- Proven ability to drive a healthy and inclusive team culture, both within and beyond your area of influence, inspiring and coaching more junior colleagues in the product craft and competencies.
- You’re personally invested in coaching, mentoring, and making great Product Managers even better.
- Consistently engaging and motivating people with a variety of perspectives around the roadmap for your and your team’s products; facing into difficult conversations and giving others licence to challenge your perspective.
- Ability to switch between strategic visioning and getting into the detail, being the authority in all aspects of your product set and helping your team to be the same for their own.
- Creating positive and consistent impact with internal and external audiences; excellent stakeholder management skills, ensuring senior stakeholder advocacy for your product set even when juggling priorities coming from multiple areas of the organisation.
- Strong leadership and influencing skills, adapting your decision making to different levels of ambiguity and urgency; developing an authentic and consistent leadership style based on a robust knowledge of yourself.
- A high level of team contribution, seek opportunities to provide input and support across the team and outside core areas of focus, role-model effective collaboration.
- Recognition and celebration of success by colleagues within your team and across the division and rest of the organisation.
Support we will provide
- Access to personal development tools including industry leading Bitesize talks, online self-development tools, and internal mentoring/coaching.
- Internal product expertise and co-learning opportunities within a highly collaborative environment.
- Opportunities to attend external events.
- Product Competency Framework.
#LI-HM1
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 get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. 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 20% 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 additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay 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, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.
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).