Innovation Manager

Job Purpose

Own and lead the end-to-end innovation agenda for the brand/category, ensuring a consumer-led innovation pipeline that delivers incremental growth, faster time-to-market, and strong cross-functional alignment.

Duties and Responsibilities

1. Innovation Strategy & Pipeline Ownership

• Define, shape, and prioritize innovation growth opportunities across brand, category, and pack formats, grounded in deep consumer, shopper, and category understanding.
• Identify unmet consumer needs, emerging consumer groups, and category white spaces to fuel a robust innovation agenda.
• Build, maintain, and prioritize a rolling innovation pipeline that balances consumer desirability, strategic fit, feasibility, and ROI.
• Lead the end-to-end innovation process from ideation to launch, ensuring adherence to Stage-Gate governance, clear decision-making guardrails, and continuous improvement in time-to-market.
• Manager project timelines, risks, and dependencies across R&D, Supply Chain, Finance, Legal, Procurement and Marketing.

2. Consumer-Led Development & Validation

• Partner closely with CMI to translate consumer, shopper, and customer insights into actionable innovation strategies and decisions.
• Support design direction, product and pack format choices, and consumer experience innovation in collaboration with brand, design and CMI teams.
• Lead concept development and innovation proposition and manage with CMI consumer and market testing to validate concepts, refine propositions, and ensure strong in-market acceptance.

3. Business, Financial & Portfolio Impact

• Develop compelling innovation business cases, tracking project costs, risks, and returns throughout the development cycle.
• Assess and manage the impact of innovation initiatives on total portfolio performance, including volume, value, and brand equity.
• Collaborate with Finance and RMG to evaluate and optimize liquid and pack COGS, production costs, and overheads, balancing margin delivery with consumer appeal and competitive advantage.

4. Culture, Ways of Working & People Leadership

• Champion a strong innovation culture within Marketing, promoting creativity, experimentation, and agile ways of working.
• Define and embed clear innovation ways of working, roles, and cross-functional responsibilities.
• Act as the central connection between global, regional, and local stakeholders.
• Directly manage and coach the Innovation Specialist, ensuring high-quality delivery, capability development, and effective execution of the innovation agenda in line with agreed processes and guardrails.