Senior Manager, Digital Communications

About the roleAre you a hands-on digital leader with a passion for driving employee engagement and corporate storytelling? This role is a mix of strategic communications, platform governance and technical delivery. You’ll manage a team of between five and seven Partners, who own our internal intranet, corporate website and digital signage. 

The channels you own reach Partners (employees), contractors, suppliers, media, bondholders, analysts, charities, NGOs and other stakeholders, and allow us to tell our story directly to those audiences, as well as providing a quick and efficient means to discover knowledge (reference material) and complete basic tasks.

You work with vendors to create a roadmap of new features, enhancements to the user experience and initiatives to support greater adoption. As an employee-owned business, we’re striving for record levels of engagement, high reach, strong adoption and high user satisfaction across all of our primary channels. You’ll lead by example – writing copy, designing pages, commissioning content, amending HTML/CSS code and maintaining configuration settings – as well as setting direction. As the products and delivery team matures in capability, the role will naturally evolve, allowing a greater focus on strategy and less on delivery.

While your primary focus is to act as the ‘business lead’ and represent the needs of your users, you have a good understanding of the technical aspects of the products and platforms you own including user provisioning, data flows, integrations, security, change management and deployment.

You champion accessibility across all platforms, ensuring full compliance with data privacy, information security, and data retention schedules, and all relevant regulatory policies for content sharing. You are responsible for investment justification (writing business cases), setting channel standards and policies, and owning measurement and reporting.

• Contract type - Permanent

• Working pattern/flexible working - The Partnership has adopted a hybrid working approach, meaning you'll be able to work a mixture between the office and home based upon your personal needs whilst balancing the needs of the business. You’ll be expected to be in either our Pimlico or Bracknell office at least three days a week.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy and roadmap:

• Define and own the product vision, strategy and roadmap for our channels, aligned with the Partnership’s strategy and user needs.

• Conduct user research and analysis to identify opportunities to improve the user experience and drive adoption.

• Stay abreast of channels best practices, emerging technologies, and competitor analysis, specifically within the retail industry.

• Develop and maintain a prioritised backlog of features and enhancements, ensuring alignment with the product roadmap.

• Leading the strategic relationship with vendors, including negotiation alongside Procurement.
   

Platform management:

• Serve as the subject matter expert for the platforms you own, including their features, functionality, and best practices.

• Manage the day-to-day operations of the intranet, corporate website and digital signage, including content updates and support via your team.

• Collaborate with others to ensure the platform is secure, reliable, scalable and compliant.

• Channel metrics improved: including visitors, their stickiness and total pageviews, to be agreed with your manager at the start of each year.
   

Content and engagement:

• Develop and implement content strategies to ensure the intranet is engaging and informative.

• Work with content creators across the business to ensure content is high-quality, relevant, accurate and up-to-date.

• Drive adoption and engagement with the intranet through targeted communications and training initiatives.
   

Governance and measurement:

• Establish and maintain governance processes for the intranet, including content approval workflows and user access controls.

• Set the standards, and create data visualisation products and automations, to improve the adoption of outcome-based campaigns across the directorate. Work with data owners in other teams to create a suite of data points the directorate can draw upon to measure the success of their campaigns.

• Define and track objectives and key results to measure the effectiveness of our channels in meeting business objectives.

Essential skills/experience you’ll need 

• Significant experience in a digital product management, platform management or similar role, with a focus on internal and external communications channels.

• People management

• Proven track record of developing and implementing successful digital channel strategies.

• Hands-on experience with content management systems, ideally LumApps and Sitecore.

• Experience with email marketing platforms (e.g. Staffbase) and digital signage solutions (e.g. Comeen).

• Demonstrated ability to conduct user research, analyse data and generate insights to inform channel improvements.

• Strong understanding of user experience (UX) principles and accessibility standards.

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About The Partnership

We’re the largest employee owned business in the UK and home of our cherished brands, John Lewis and Waitrose. We’re not just employees, we’re Partners, driven by our purpose to build a happier world. As we look to our future, there’s never been a more exciting time to join us.  

We’re ruthlessly focused on being brilliant at retail. We continue to innovate, adapt and diversify. Never Knowingly Undersold on price, quality and service in John Lewis and passionately serving food-lovers in Waitrose.   

As Partners we all share the responsibility of ownership and in its rewards. We use our voices to contribute to our success, working together through the good and challenging times, holding true to our behaviours and treating everyone with kindness and respect. 

We all own making the Partnership somewhere we belong. Embracing our differences and creating an environment where we’re free to be ourselves and can THRIVE. Growing ourselves individually, and as a collective. 

As Partners, we make all the difference. And, we all own it.  

Important points to note:  

It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre-employment vetting (which may include DBS checks for successful candidates). If required, you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third-party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some of our roles.  

We occasionally close vacancies early in the event we receive a high volume of applications, and therefore, we recommend you apply early. If you require a reasonable adjustment due to a disability which means you may need longer to complete your application please contact us as soon as possible.

We want all of our Partners to have a good work-life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview.