Retail Product Manager Waitrose

As a Retail Product Manager, you will be a driving force behind retail excellence, maintaining a relentless connection to our customers and the partners running our shops. Operating as the ultimate subject matter expert within your cross-functional team, you will champion the voice of the customer, end-user, and business stakeholders in a complex and rapidly changing grocery environment.

Your core mission goes beyond simple product feature delivery. Your goal is to maximise product value, minimise operational risks, and bring true agility to our development processes within retail. By building, owning, and managing a transparent Product backlog and a clear roadmap, your decisions will directly shape the future of our retail ecosystem. Balancing commercial targets with customer needs, you will bridge the gap between highly technical development teams and non-technical business leaders ensuring that every sprint delivers meaningful impact and aligns seamlessly with the broader vision of the John Lewis Partnership.

The product domain that this role will cover is Workforce Management. These are tools that we use in our business to schedule Partners and allocate tasks and communications from head offices to shop Partners.

Contract Type: Permanent

Hours of Work: 35 per week

Salary: £64,000 - £96,000
 

Location: Hybrid, 3 days at our Bracknell office and regular shop visits

Key responsibilities

• Create an inspiring vision for the product(s) outcome and drive innovation using industry, customer, and business insights. 

• Build, own, and deliver a clear, outcome driven Product Roadmap that supports the broader retail strategy for product development.

• Set clear, stretching Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to track and measure the desired product outcomes. 

• Lead and mentor a team of up to three direct reports while utilising high emotional intelligence to align and collaborate with a diverse range of technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Lead teams on taking large ambiguous problems and breaking it down into small, solvable chunks to prioritise across development teams

• Leverage proven experience leading teams within Agile methodologies (such as SCRUM or Kanban) to solve complex problems and balance multiple competing priorities.

Essential skills/experience you’ll need: 

• Experience of managing individuals using frameworks such as SCRUM or Kanban.

• Able to utilise analytics, insights, and metrics to continually optimise and iterate the product(s), making data driven decisions to set the direction of the product roadmap

• Highly skilled at bringing a fresh, innovative perspective to existing solutions and overcoming difficult challenges.

• Capable of managing diverse stakeholder expectation including the ability to influence across the organisation whilst delivering results under competing demands

• Flexibility and a proactive approach to handle shifting requirements in a fast-paced retail environment. 

Desirable skills/experience you may have:

• Experience in defining and delivering Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and executing A/B or multivariate testing to validate features and drive data-informed product iterations.

We’re the largest employee owned business in the UK and home of our cherished brands, John Lewis and Waitrose. We’re not just employees, we’re Partners, driven by our purpose to build a happier world. As we look to our future, there’s never been a more exciting time to join us.  

We’re ruthlessly focused on being brilliant at retail. We continue to innovate, adapt and diversify. Never Knowingly Undersold on price, quality and service in John Lewis and passionately serving food-lovers in Waitrose.   

As Partners we all share the responsibility of ownership and in its rewards. We use our voices to contribute to our success, working together through the good and challenging times, holding true to our behaviours and treating everyone with kindness and respect. 

We all own making the Partnership somewhere we belong. Embracing our differences and creating an environment where we’re free to be ourselves and can THRIVE. Growing ourselves individually, and as a collective. 

As Partners, we make all the difference. And, we all own it.  

Important points to note:  

It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre-employment vetting (which may include DBS checks for successful candidates). If required, you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third-party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some of our roles.  

We occasionally close vacancies early in the event we receive a high volume of applications, and therefore, we recommend you apply early. If you require a reasonable adjustment due to a disability which means you may need longer to complete your application please contact us as soon as possible.

We want all of our Partners to have a good work-life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview. 

Attachment: Download Job Attachment