Product Development Manager - Business Intelligence

This is an excellent opportunity to join a rapidly expanding Business Intelligence Systems team working with a great mix of experience both inside Next and across the industry. BIS is transforming from a traditional SQL team to a modern hybrid cloud platform bringing together the best data, analytical and reporting tools to deliver new and enhance existing products and support our users.

About the Team

We are a growing team of 50+ developers, analysts and product managers responsible for providing the business with data solutions. 

Put simply. We are the oil in the machine! We take data from everywhere and convert it, merge it, model it and present it in a usable format for consumption. We have more touch points in the organisation than any other product development team. The business relies on BIS data and BIS systems to understand how it is performing, to identify opportunities to improve and to  help shape and refine proposals to realise those opportunities. 

Historically an on premise MS SQL Server based tech stack we are now providing cloud based data and analytical tools using Microsoft’s Azure platform.

About the Role

As a Product Development Manager you will be responsible for all aspects of the products under your stewardship from new product development, existing product enhancement and the operational support of your products.

Working within an agile framework you will  ensure that resources are aligned to manage a product backlog that includes technical debt, provide on-going communication to ensure that progress is transparent and ensure that the quality of your team's output meets the standards expected by the business, user and IT governance.

Leading a team of 6-10 with a standard structure of Lead Developer, Business Analyst and multiple Developers you will be responsible for their line management and ongoing development.

As a Product Development Manager you will:

• Oversee all aspects of product development
• Be the primary point of contact with business Stakeholders and Product Owners
• Oversee budgets, estimating and billing for all resources used
• Provide timely and effective communication on progress or issues
• Actively manage all risks, issues and key decisions for your products
• Identify and validate business requirements / Study strategic business drivers
• Ensure quality and governance processes are followed and that NEXT standards are met
• Lead, coach and develop a team to consistently deliver the highest standards of service required by the business

We are looking for candidates with experience of working with / around data and a strong grasp of business intelligence fundamentals. Candidates will need to be excellent communicators and great people managers.

Criteria

Essential

• Technical project management
• Team / line management (can be matrix management)
• Stakeholder management
• Experience of working with data / databases
• Knowledge of BI fundamentals incl Dimensional Modelling / Data Warehousing

Desirable

• Experience of Agile project management
• Experience of MS SQL Server BI stack (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS)
• Experience of Databricks / Unity
• Experience of PowerBI or similar e.g. Tableau
• TFS or Azure DevOps

You know Next, but did you know we’re a FTSE-100 retail company employing over 35,000 people across the UK and Ireland. We’re the UK’s 2nd largest fashion retailer and for Kidswear we’re the market leader. At the last count we have over 500 stores, plus the Next Online and it’s now possible to buy on-line from over 70 countries around the world! So we’ve gone global!