Retail Product Manager Waitrose

About the role

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 every sprint delivers meaningful impact and aligns seamlessly with the broader vision of the John Lewis Partnership.

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 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 in taking large ambiguous problems and breaking them 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 expectations, 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.