Product Group Manager - Stock & Pricing

The Role

We are looking for an experienced Product Group Manager to join the NEXT Technology Department. You will play a key role in driving NEXT forward within a fast-moving retail and growing international environment. This role demands strong leadership, technical understanding and excellent communication skills.

As a Product Group Manager, you will work alongside your team of Product Delivery Managers to deliver a suite of technology products of strategic business importance. Your responsibility spans from inception to retirement, ensuring your teams provide daily support and develop prioritised business features.

What You’ll Take On

The Stock & Pricing team supports product merchandisers by ensuring the right stock is in the right place across our UK high street, TP Partners, international wholesale and franchise stores and online customers.

In retail today, few areas of expertise are as important as this. Stock & Pricing Technology is pivotal to ensuring our products are always available, both in our stores and for online customers.

You will hold line management responsibility for Product Delivery Managers and a Senior Business Analyst, ensuring efficient resource use within your portfolio while balancing stakeholder interests. You will provide clear board-level communication that demonstrates progress, cost control and strategic alignment.

You will manage budgeting for the product domain, ensuring continuous improvement is anticipated and provisioned. With strong supplier management and proven negotiation skills, you will deliver excellent cost control.

You will oversee all aspects of delivery within a collaborative and agile framework, providing transparent communication aligned with the quality standards expected by stakeholders and IT governance.

Key Responsibilities:
  Programme Management

• Manage business alignment and expectations by effectively communicating portfolio deliverables, backlogs and priorities
• Oversee the successful delivery of all projects within the portfolio
• Manage accounting, estimating and billing for all resource utilisation

Team Management

• Lead, coach and develop a team of Product Delivery Managers to consistently deliver the highest standards of service
• Ensure complete adherence to design, creation, testing approaches and documentation standards
• Develop the technical and behavioural skills of the team, promoting a continuous learning culture

Stakeholder Management

• Ensure NEXT Technology and business stakeholders remain fully aligned on project aims and deliverables
• Evaluate, prioritise and resource issues raised by business users effectively
• Maintain professional, clear and purposeful communication with the business
• Build and maintain strong working relationships with key stakeholders and business users
• Work closely with other systems teams to improve cross-team collaboration

Sub-Department Management

• Ensure budgets for resources and services are correctly provisioned through the appropriate financial processes
• Maintain, review and negotiate supplier contracts to maximise cost-effectiveness

What You’ll Bring

• A proven track record of delivering large-scale, high-profile enterprise initiatives from inception to completion within an agile environment as a Software Development, Project or Product Manager
• Demonstrable experience creating service level roadmaps, prioritising backlogs, developing business cases and utilizing insights like user feedback and performance analytics
• Strong legal, compliance and commercial competencies, with experience negotiating contracts in excess of £5m TCO
• Extensive experience managing complex projects and portfolios
• The ability to manage executive stakeholders and build key business relationships
• Exceptional people management skills, with a focus on leading, developing and coaching multi-disciplinary teams across various specialisms such as security, design and operations
• Strong leadership skills and previous experience managing teams
• Transferable skills applicable across multiple domains
• Experience managing a demanding workload with a strong ability to plan and prioritise multiple streams of work
• Proven performance communicating program status, costs and risks clearly to executive stakeholders
• Excellent ambassadorial skills when representing the business in front of clients, suppliers and partners

 

#LI-LE1 #LI-Hybrid

You know Next, but did you know we’re a FTSE-100 retail company employing over 44,000 people across the Next group. We’re the UK’s 2nd largest fashion retailer and for Kidswear we’re the market leader. At the last count we have over 450 stores, plus the Next Online and it’s now possible to buy on-line from over 80 countries around the world! So we’ve gone global!