Job Description

The Role:

Join Next’s dynamic Warehouse & Distribution Technology Domain, a crucial part of one of the UK’s largest online retail platforms.

As a team of circa 160 professionals, we play a crucial role in helping to deliver and support a portfolio of software development projects and we are looking for a Product Development Manager to join our team.

This pivotal role takes full strategic ownership of core products, directly impacting our warehouse operations both here and abroad enabling cost savings, service enhancements, capacity increases and resiliency improvements.

What You'll Take On:

You will lead and have line management responsibility for a software development team, overseeing all aspects of project delivery in a highly collaborative and agile framework, providing ongoing communication to ensure progress is fully transparent, understood and aligned to our quality standards and IT governance.

The role demands strong leadership and technical acumen, aligned with proven project management capabilities and excellent communication.

Your core responsibilities and measures of success will include:

• Overseeing all stages of project delivery, managing risks, issues and decisions.
• Establishing and validating project scope aligned with strategic business drivers.
• Ensuring projects are delivered on time, on budget and aligned with priorities.
• Managing the product development lifecycle using Agile Delivery Methods.
• Leading, coaching, and developing a team of Developers to deliver the highest standards.
• Managing team performance, setting clear objectives, and fostering collaboration.
• Communicating project status clearly to all stakeholders.
• Partnering with cross-functional teams to integrate workflows.
• Ensuring full compliance with policies, governance, and NEXT standards.
• Actively managing all project risks and driving continuous improvement in processes.

What You'll Bring:

We're looking for a hands-on leader with a blend of strong project management and exceptional leadership skills, ready to drive efficiency and innovation on a global scale.

You will have:

• Proven experience managing complex projects and portfolios.
• Strong senior stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Demonstrated experience in team leadership, coaching, and development.
• Background in a fast-paced warehousing, logistics, eCommerce, marketing, retail technology environment or similar..
• Proficiency with ALM tools (e.g., Jira, Azure DevOps).
• Familiarity with Agile or hybrid project delivery models.
• The ability to plan and prioritise workload in an agile, demanding environment
• Excellent communication skills

Location

You’ll be doing all this from our Yorkshire Office on the same complex as 4 of our biggest warehouses so you can really see the impact and value of the projects we deliver and be close to our key stakeholders and business owners. You’ll be joining a fast-paced, encouraging, and supportive environment. Bring your energy. Play to your strengths. Make things bigger and better than before. Let’s Take It On.

#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!