Senior Subject Matter Expert Merchandising

Job content

Job Description:

An exciting opportunity to join the Clothing and Home (C&H) team as we accelerate the transformation of our business to suit the changing needs of our customers.

One of our transformation objectives is to ‘build a product engine that delivers profitable sales growth globally’ and as an experienced Merchandiser, you will be responsible for supporting the business lead by scoping, managing, and delivering projects, ensuring they fit the business needs.

Priorities will lie across two key value streams within the transformation: ‘world class commercial process’ and ‘agile efficient and sustainable sourcing.’ These streams focus on introducing data and reporting tools to make quicker trading decisions, improving our end-to-end product creation processes, increasing our speed and flexibility to repeat bestselling products, shortening our overall critical path across the business, and ensuring our raw materials are fully traceable.

You will be at the forefront of C&H’s transformation journey by working across multiple teams to support the introduction of new ways of working by deploying data science, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence. We want to unlock the value of data for M&S. This is a great opportunity for someone who is experienced in change management and wants to expand on that experience working across multiple teams to embed new ways of working and to drive real business change.

You should be highly organised, enjoy working at pace, have a pragmatic approach to problem solving and strong relationship building and communication skills.

Key Accountabilities And Measures

• Engage stakeholders across the business to ensure successful delivery of change.
• Work closely with the programme manager to build the projects, drive action plans, budget management and benefit tracking across the use cases driving the changing ways of working.
• Work closely with the data product manager to devise the change management plan to increase adoption of the new ways of working and cement the change.
• Lead the continuous review of the projects and use cases to ensure these evolve in line with the business strategy.
• Responsible for use case solutions meeting the needs of the business and ensuring return on investment.
• Schedule and support workshops, nominating C&H reps to join and driving accountability for attendance, outputs and follow-up to deliver against project milestones.
• Support the understanding and detailing of interdependencies between projects and use cases.
• Maintain close communication and collaboration with key stakeholders.
• Proactively help the team find further opportunities across C&H to unlock business value.
• Build strong and effective relationships across the different teams and be the ‘go to’ C&H person for the data product managers, data scientists and other technology teams, as well as the C&H core transformation teams.
• Be an advocate for the data science and data transformation strategy and vision, supporting with communication of progress and benefits to the wider business.
• Champion an agile way of working, promoting a ‘test and learn’ and ‘fail fast’ approach.
  
  

Key Skills And Experience

• Must be intellectually curious, open to challenging ways of working, resilient and ready to drive change for the business.
• Extensive change management is expected.
• Be a great communicator, with the ability to challenge, influence and inform others.
• Establish links across the business, ability to work collaboratively to attain results that meet the business needs.
• Be highly organised and have an ability to prioritise and adapt quickly and expertly.
• Demonstrate effective cross business stakeholder management skills.
• Has the knowledge and capacity to answer business questions and generate ideas to tackle business problems.
• Ability to mobilise a virtual team, working collaboratively to seek input and advice from colleagues where required.
• Merchandising experience or knowledge of Merchandising systems, process and teams is desirable but not essential.
• Has a passion and resilience to drive business transformation at pace and can think strategically.
• A self-starter who identifies opportunity, encouraging new ideas and drives positive business change.
  
  

Key relationships and stakeholders

• C&H Transformation Office
• Programme Leads & Sponsors
• C&H Business Units (Womenswear, Menswear, Kidswear, Lingerie, Home)
• Digital and Data Teams – including data scientists, data engineers, data product managers
• Development, Innovation and Product Teams
• Data Product Managers
• Data Analytics Team
• Business Unit Stakeholders