Senior Manager, Digital Communications

John Lewis Partnership

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Are 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.

Requirements

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.

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.