Senior D&A Delivery Manager

Job Description:

Senior D&A Delivery Manager

Multiple locations: London-UK, Slough-UK, Veghel – NL, Aimargues, Strasbourg – FR

• Royal Canin is undergoing a significant Digital Transformation journey. Our ability to solve the most critical problems across Mars in a User Centric way through Data & Analytics is fundamental to our growth ambition and transformation. Significant early success in this journey, and the introduction of many critical foundational capabilities, means that we are looking to accelerate our ability to solve problems and ultimately drive value for Mars Inc.

• The opportunities are significant for Mars, and the opportunities for those working in this space are both hugely exciting and rewarding. Connecting and deriving break-through insight from our Royal Canin and Petcare data ecosystems, leveraging the rapidly growing world of external data to get closer to our customers and consumers than ever before, and unlocking efficiencies and automation across our End-To-End Value Chain.

• Building on this momentum, we are recruiting a Senior D&A Delivery Manager to join our Royal Canin Global Data & Analytics Team who will help accelerate the Global Analytics Delivery agenda in close partnership with the Product Management Organizations and the Regional D&A Teams.

What will be your key responsibilities?

• As a Senior D&A Delivery Manager you will be responsible for nurturing cross-functional teams of delivery experts, ensuring all products within are developed and sustained seamlessly, financially operable, and contribute high value towards Royal Canin's business goals.

• Reporting into the Global Director of D&A Delivery, you will leverage a deep understanding of Agile and Product methodologies to execute the delivery strategy for Royal Canin D&A.

• You will partner with the Product Management and Regional D&A Organizations to ensure their product Strategies and Vision can become a reality by providing effective Technological and People/Vendor Capabilities.

• In this role, you will operate at the intersection of strategy, technology, and execution. As a skilled collaborator, you will help shape and maintain high-performing product teams. Your ability to navigate organizational dynamics, anticipate challenges, and broker different approaches (e.g. speed to value against technical rigor) will be crucial to your success.

• You will have an accountability for orchestrating part of the D&A product/vendor landscape, ensuring all financial, commercial and programmatic aspects are met by your delivery team(s).

• The job holder will be instrumental in helping to establish, support and reinforce a build a best-in-class data driven culture within Royal Canin. You will evangelize a product-led mindset while fostering a new way of delivering Data & Analytics products for speed and maximum impact.

Within this team, you will:

• Develop and nurture relationships across Royal Canin and the PetCare businesses ecosystem to ensure direct participation in the relevant strategic forums to shape, influence and articulate key opportunity areas and translating these into breakthrough solutions.

• Be a change agent for shifting from project to product mindset, reframe the context for what data & advanced analytics is and how to unlock value through leveraging product development to solve business problems, and evangelize product lifecycle mindset to support product strategy and support through end of life.

• Leverage organizational and Agile expertise to form high-performing teams, holding them accountable to agreed product team roles. Encourage quality in delivery, and a balance between program/enterprise standards and the specific needs of product roadmaps.

• Provide expert delivery guidance to help decide product execution strategy (e.g. technology used, build vs. buy).

• Be financial accountability for the products under your remit, building and utilizing mutual vendor partnerships to enable and enhance product value at both operational and strategic levels.

• Act as a Agile coach within the product organization, changing expectations of ‘what is possible’ and ensuring that associates are skilled in the use of new products and capabilities.

What are we looking for?

• This role must “lead with problems, not tools” in an unbiased way to determine when appropriate to drive scaling as-is versus when to opportunistically evolve a Product or way of working to support increasing competitive advantage.

• Ability to identify the “true requirements” of our product squads, with a focus on augmenting the delivery model and output

• Able to diagnose people, process and technology problems both iteratively and with big-step changes. Either lead on initiatives to address, or as part of the broader delivery function.

• Although not a deep technical role, be technically savvy enough to engage with Data, Analytics and AI experts as a peer or leader to ensure delivery capabilities are fit for value case

Knowledge / Experience

• Overall, 7-10 years of relevant experience; Minimum 3 years of delivery experience in a product-centric organization.

• Strong track record of managing multi-functional teams, with awareness of the drivers of complexity within delivery.

• Experience of Analytics in the CPG industry preferable

• Delivery experience using Agile and Product methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban) and PPM tools (e.g. JIRA, Azure DevOps, ServiceNow) essential

• Experience advantageous in technology/source systems (SAP ERP, OMP/Planning, Salesforce Azure, SQL, Hive, PowerBI, React)

Education & Professional Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Management, Business Administration, STEM subjects, or related field. Master’s level advantageous.

• Agile product delivery qualifications (e.g. Scrum, SixSigma, SaFe) highly preferred

• Change management qualification (e.g. PROSCI) a plus

Key Mars Leadership Competencies

• Collaborates, Manages Ambiguity, Manages Complexity, Organizational Savvy, Resourcefulness

What can you expect from Mars?

• Work with over 140,000 diverse and talented Associates, all guided by the Five Principles.

• Join a purpose driven company, where we’re striving to build the world we want tomorrow, today.

• Best-in-class learning and development support from day one, including access to our in-house Mars University.

• An industry competitive salary and benefits package, including company bonus.

#TBDDT

Mars is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need assistance or an accommodation during the application process because of a disability, it is available upon request. The company is pleased to provide such assistance, and no applicant will be penalized as a result of such a request.