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.
Senior Product Manager - Applied Data & Analytics (ADA)
Why Sainsbury’s
As an organisation Sainsbury’s is committed to diversity & inclusion and has set the goal of being the most inclusive retailer. We’re also committed to work-life balance. We offer our colleagues as much flexibility as possible in line with the needs of their role. We trust them to decide how, where and when they work, combining remote and collaborative working with a flexible approach to hours, giving them plenty of time and space for life outside of work whilst delivering against our business goals.
Yes, we’re a supermarket. And a multi-brand business whose tech touches 70% of the UK. We wrote the book (OK, the catalogue) on online shopping with Argos, inspired beautiful living with Habitat and made the latest fashions accessible to all with Tu, while also rewarding our customers with Nectar and we opened the UK’s first supermarket bank. Today, we’re bringing Digital, Tech and Data together like never before. Game-changing? You bet.
Our Sainsbury’s Tech organisation is well established and so is our data organisation. We’ve been operating as a data centre of excellence for over 5 years, growing to 300 skilled people across data engineering, machine learning engineering, data architecture, data governance, data science, analytics, reporting and data product. We support data-led decisioning across retail, digital, commercial, supply chain & logistics and finance. We have a consistent record of having leaders in the Data IQ Top 100.
About the role
Your goal is to help the business and our customers make smarter decisions using data. You’ll be aligned to a business process or customer journey where you’ll lead cross functional analytics and data science squads to deliver data products that deliver demonstrable business value.
You’ll be joining an established team that has grown from 2 to 10 Product Managers in the last 2 years, has delivered clear success and has sponsorship from all levels of stakeholders.
Our definition of data products you’ll be delivering is very much focused on user driven actions:
- Role based performance diagnostic. Automated self-serve insights on performance via web or app.
- Alerts on performance. Automated alerts to prescribe what action to take via app.
- Automated decisions. Machine driven decisions either human in the loop or human out of the loop.
We’ve got data products in production, supporting our 1,400 stores and store support centre. These data products are helping improve product recommendations, availability, pricing, and range. If you’ve shopped on our Sainsburys, Argos, Tu or Habitat websites or instore, you’ll have benefited from our data products.
You’ll work closely with our data platform team who have for the last few years been building our corporate cloud data platform, providing single source trusted data at scale and speed.
Key responsibilities
- Ensuring that your analytics squads are prioritised to work on the highest value opportunities within your business area.
- Ensure that you can articulate the reach and impact of your data products to demonstrate the value delivered and identify opportunities for further product development.
- Creation of quarterly product roadmaps, maintaining a product strategy and backlog that is broken down into product and feature releases with clear increments of value.
- Data product discovery from ideation through to defining the data product requirements and any prototypes as necessary to test value, usability, feasibility, and viability before commencing build.
- Data product build from ensuring data product requirements are met to release management activities such as end user training to maximise end user adoption.
- Ensure users of data products have sufficient ongoing support, including product functional documentation and training, online resources, FAQs, and any similar support tools.
- Adopting and coaching teams and stakeholders on our internally defined and established data product lifecycle methodology.
- Engagement with business stakeholders to facilitate clear prioritisation and roadmap discussions, ensuring proactive delivery progress and translating technical delivery into business-friendly terminology.
- Building domain knowledge of business processes or customer journey’s the scope of your role covers. Empathy for the problems within this domain and the pain points of existing users or future users.
About you
Data Product Manager is a relatively new role in industry so we’re comfortable recruiting people who may have not had this job title before. Typically, we’ve recruited Product Managers or Consultants who have good delivery lifecycle experience or Analysts who fancy a slight change in career. If you have skills and experience in the following, we’d love to hear from you!
- You are passionate about data and are data literate. We’re not looking for you to code, we are looking for you to be able to spot opportunities of where data can be used to make smarter decisions. We’re also wanting you to be able to translate opportunities into technical teams and technical solutions back into business stakeholders.
- You have experience of leading end to end delivery of data/analytics/data science. You know product or consultancy delivery methodology from ideation to release. You’ve led cross functional teams which have achieved a successful commercial outcome. You’ll be familiar with agile methodology but more importantly you’ll know the data lifecycle and nuances of designing and building data rather than software.
- You are metric literate. You will be able to identify the most important metrics to the business model and P&L. You will be able to use metrics to identify where the biggest opportunities for performance improvement are. You’ll use metrics to drive prioritisation, measure user adoption and measure the impact your data products have had.
- You are a structured problem solver and communicator. You are proactive in understanding the root cause of problems before you begin to work in the solution space. You can breakdown problems using a MECE approach into a set of issues to be addressed.
#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).