Product Manager - Innovation

What’s in it for you

We offer excellent benefits that help make Tesco a great place to work. These include but aren’t limited to:
• Annual bonus scheme where you can earn 10-20% of base salary
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus 8 Bank holidays)
• On-site state of the art gym at our Welwyn Campus with discounted “Gympass” membership & free health checks via Nuffield Health
• Retirement savings plan - save between 4% and 7.5% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Life Assurance - 5 x contractual pay
• Share Schemes – Join our ‘Buy As You Earn’ & ‘Save As You Earn’ share schemes after 3 months service
• Colleague Clubcard (including a 2nd card for a household member) after 3 months service
• Colleague Discounts:
• 10% increasing to 15% after every pay day for a four day period, off most purchases at Tesco
• 10% off One Stop
• 10% off pay monthly & SIM only deals with Tesco Mobile
• 20% off all F&F purchases
• 20% off car, pet and home insurance at Tesco bank. T&C’s apply
• 25% off Tesco Café
• 50% off complete glasses purchases & free eye tests (other offers available) at Vision Express
• 50% off health checks at Tesco Pharmacy
• An exclusive deals and discounts website saving you money on everyday purchases, treats for the family, eating out and utility bills for the home
• Cycle to work scheme
• Shuttle Bus Service to/from Hatfield & Welwyn Garden City Station to Welwyn Campus & Hatfield Offices
• Opportunities to get on - take advantage of our ongoing learning opportunities and award-winning training, to help you achieve the job and career you want
• Our Employee Assistance Programme helps you deal with life’s challenges
• Financial wellness - Tesco has partnered with experts to help you make the most of your money
• Get involved in a range of fundraising activities with our long-term charity partners

About the role

We use our passion for innovation, to create new and disruptive retail focussed experiences and products, for Tesco customers and colleagues globally. Tesco has a proud track record of innovation and has dedicated teams to ensure we continue to focus in this area.

Tesco Labs is the research and development team within Tesco Technology. Our products are typically ‘new to world’ or ‘new to retail’. We work across the Innovation Horizons, from nearer term opportunities to testing hypothesis in experimental, breakthrough innovation. Our aim is to create a culture of innovation by inspiring our colleagues and the wider community. 

Within Tesco, we work alongside the Group Innovation team. Group Innovation has a broader focus, spanning all aspects of our business, to realise new disruptive innovation opportunities that enhance what we do or how we do things. This team partners with Tesco Labs where that opportunity involves technology.

This vacancy involves managing discrete products in the Lab, either for Group Innovation or Tesco Technology.  The products are very diverse and could be about near-term innovation or far horizon experiments. It really is a role at the cutting edge and no two days are the same. We’re looking for someone with an innovator’s mindset and product management rigour. You’ll need to be comfortable with complexity and ambiguity while moving products forward, often with tight deadlines. A role in the Lab means ‘no blueprints’ ways of working – we’re inventing the new. We’re looking for a real self-starter to discover, define, develop and deliver world class, new to world products.

If that sounds exciting, then we'd love to hear from you.

You will be responsible for

Whilst specific responsibilities will be dependent upon the changing needs of the Tesco business, the following provides an overview of the role’s key responsibilities and measures:

• Have complete ownership of complex products within a portfolio, involving multiple internal/external stakeholders and drive the product strategy and execution for that product/s.
• Formulate the vision, strategy and roadmap for the set of product/s I own in the portfolio (product mix, new products, retirement of old products), and work with others in aligning the strategic priorities, dependencies and roadmap across the product portfolio. 
• Quickly build market knowledge and assess new product opportunities (gathering ideas, research, carrying out analysis, refining and prioritising new requirements).
• Plan and co-ordinate significant product efforts that have dependencies on multiple product and engineering teams. 
• Steer sprint/release planning sessions by working with engineering counterparts to plan sprints/releases that deliver maximum business value with the least effort. 
• Identify and drive improvements to the way in which product performance and service levels are measured to ensure product quality, reliability and security. 
• Lead discovery work around a minimum viable product (MVP) for any new product/ feature, collaborating with user experience (UX) and engineering teams to prototype and validate a MVP. 
• Help the team in breaking down a complex piece of work/ epic into smaller, deliverable chunks of value that can be delivered faster. 
• Provide leadership and direction to cross functional team(s) on short-term tasks/ near-term priorities. 
• Are accountable for the performance/ adoption of my product and work towards increasing it. 

You will need

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• A methodical/ analytical approach and great problem-solving skills.
• Attitude and the aptitude to learn new product area/domain quickly.
• Great presentation and persuasion skills.
• Team player who could work collaboratively with other members of the team.
• Ownership, responsiveness and commitment towards assigned work.
• Strong decision making and prioritisation skills, especially when multiple trade-offs are involved and faster decision are required.
• Empathy and good listening skills to understand the needs/ pain points of your customers/ stakeholders.
• Excellent facilitation to effectively facilitate requirement gathering/elicitation sessions with senior business leaders/ stakeholders.
• Supplier management and negotiation skills.
• Knowledge of Agile methodologies, writing effective user stories/ acceptance criterions.
• Understanding of User Research/ Design Thinking concepts. 

The ideal candidate must have the following experience:

• Effectively worked with senior stakeholders outside of their immediate product team to market the product and gather feedback and new requirements.
• Have proven success in working on unstructured problems, defining hypothesis, creating MVPs, running experiments and analysing results to drive data-driven decisions.
• Driven experiments against defined hypotheses, created MVPs towards robust data-driven decisions on product improvements and their influence on product performance indicators. 
• Took multiple ideas (at least 1 new product/idea) from conception to go-live, through standard software product development lifecycle and got measurable success across defined KPIs. 
• Good domain expertise in the relevant functional area/ a large complex domain.
• Knowledge and experience of the paradigms and trade-offs surrounding software architectures and software technical design choices.

About us

Our vision here at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move. Our core purpose is ‘Serving Britain's shoppers a little better every day’. Our business was built with a simple mission – to be the champion for customers, helping them to enjoy a better quality of life and an easier way of living. This hasn't changed. Customers want great products at great value which they can buy easily and it's our job to deliver this in the right way for them. In the UK, we serve some 66 shoppers every second, so it's our goal to ensure every one of those customers experiences just a little better service on each visit.

At Tesco, inclusion means that Everyone’s Welcome. Everyone is treated fairly and with respect; by valuing individuality and uniqueness we create a sense of belonging.
Diversity and inclusion have always been at the heart of Tesco. It is embedded in our values: we treat people how they want to be treated. We always want our colleagues to feel they can be themselves at work and we are committed to helping them be at their best.

Across the Tesco group we are building an inclusive workplace, a place to actively celebrate the cultures, personalities and preferences of our colleagues – who in turn help to build the success of our business and reflect the diversity of the communities we serve.

It remains that Shire Park is our central location for Head Office teams. We have recently announced that we will be moving towards a more blended working week – combining office and remote working.  Our base will be the office, where we connect, collaborate and innovate – and there will be the expectation for everyone to be in the office more often than not. For Head Office roles we therefore expect colleagues to spend a proportion of their time at our offices in Shire Park.

We are supportive of colleagues having conversations with hiring managers about what office presence will look like in the context of the role.

NOTE: Should you be successful in your application, your offer will be subject to and conditional upon you providing your bank account details on your agreed start date.