Salary up to: Competitive

Senior Data Product Manager

Job Description

Reporting to: Head of Product
Base Location: Putney

About the role:

Nando's is on a journey of Changing Lives Together, creating lasting happiness for our people, our customers, and the communities we work in. Originally started in Johannesburg, South Africa, we pride ourselves on creating memorable experiences for everyone involved in Nando's: from our employees, communities, founders, and suppliers, but most importantly, our customers.

As a Senior Data Product Manager at Nando's, you will work across our data and AI capabilities, demonstrating deep expertise and acting as the recognised authority for your area. You'll help drive the data and AI product strategy, influence senior stakeholders, and deliver significant business impact, turning complex data capabilities into trusted, governed assets that empower our restaurants, support teams and leaders to make better decisions every day. Alongside this, you'll contribute to the growth of our product management capability across the function.

This role sits at the intersection of technology, insight and strategy. You will partner closely with engineering, data engineering, analytics, and AI engineers to define what we build, why we build it, and how we measure success, translating complex technical possibilities into clear business value.

Key Responsibilities & Expectations:

Data Strategy & Vision

• Help shape and contribute to the data and AI product strategy, aligned with business objectives
• Support the prioritisation of complex and competing opportunities across analytics, AI, and governance
• Support the integration of roadmaps across data engineering, analytics, and AI teams to ensure strategic alignment
• Demonstrate deep expertise in data products and knowledge across related platforms and domains
• Anticipate shifts in the data and AI landscape and bring emerging capabilities and trends into strategic conversations
• Collaborate with and influence stakeholders to drive positive outcomes from data investment

Advanced Product Execution

• Working with our business stakeholders to understand the outcomes they are trying to achieve and working with them to solve through these through data and technology products
• Play a leading role in complex data product launches involving multiple teams, dependencies, and business change
• Demonstrate strong understanding of data platform architecture, pipelines, data models, warehousing, serving layers, and translate technical concepts for business stakeholders
• Partner closely with Tech Leads, who owns backlog management, sprint planning and delivery, bringing the what and why while the Tech Lead owns the how and when
• Create an experimentation culture across your data product area
• Contribute to continuous improvement in data product ways of working across the data domain

Senior Stakeholder Partnership

• Partner with stakeholders to align on strategic data initiatives
• Influence senior stakeholder priorities through compelling co-created business cases
• Drive alignment and decision-making across stakeholder forums to support work on priorities, trade-offs and sequencing
• Build strong relationships across the organisation to drive adoption of data products and self-serve analytics
• Collaborate with other Product Managers in the Enterprise space to ensure data capabilities support their roadmaps without duplicating ownership

Customer & Data User Focus

• Act as the recognised authority for data products within the team, building strong working relationships with peers, stakeholders and tech leadership
• Run research and discovery to understand the needs of internal data users (e.g. restaurant managers, finance analysts, HR business partners) and surface unmet needs
• Identify data quality and access problems across the domain that impact end users or business operations
• Work collaboratively to develop practical solutions to complex data challenges
• Contribute to improving team ways of working to support delivery velocity and quality

Data & Analytics

• Contribute to the roadmap for self-serve analytics and BI tooling, helping teams across Nando's access trusted data without engineering dependency
• Create and share knowledge of data product analytics that helps the team and stakeholders make more informed decisions
• Work to help define and track measurement frameworks and data quality standards that build trust in data across the business
• Promote data accessibility, helping to make insight usable and relevant for Nandocas at every level

AI & Machine Learning Products

• Define and drive the product requirements for features that deliver measurable value, from demand forecasting and labour optimisation to intelligent automation
• Work closely with engineers to understand and contribute to evaluation frameworks, helping ensure models perform safely and reliably in production
• Translate AI capabilities into clear product requirements, user stories and acceptance criteria that engineering teams can act on
• Stay close to the AI landscape and bring relevant ideas and opportunities to the team, grounded in Nando's strategic priorities

Data Governance & Quality

• Define and shape the product thinking around data governance, ownership, lineage, cataloguing, access controls and quality standards
• Work with the Risk team, Data Platform team and other key stakeholders to ensure data practices meet regulatory requirements (GDPR and beyond) without slowing down innovation
• Define and track data quality standards that make it easy for teams to trust and rely on data
• Champion a data-as-a-product mindset, treating internal datasets as first-class products with clear owners and measurable outcomes

Product Community

• Contribute to product management initiatives and share learnings from the data domain with the wider PM community
• Continuously develop your data product management skills, including data literacy, experimentation and AI product thinking
• Support the development of other Product Managers where relevant
• Engage with and contribute to evolving ways of working and best practices across the product function

Key Skills & Competencies

• Data product thinking and strategy contribution
• Stakeholder management and communication
• Growing domain expertise in data, analytics and AI, including an understanding of SQL, data modelling concepts and pipeline architecture
• Problem identification and analytical thinking across data domains
• Business impact analysis, ROI measurement and data SLA definition
• Understanding of AI/ML product development and model evaluation
• Championing data governance, quality and compliance awareness across the team and wider business
• Collaborative working with data engineering and analytics teams
• Supporting the development of others
• Contributing to and supporting complex launches
• Creating experimentation and data-driven culture
• Requirements gathering and process mapping, understanding how existing workflows and steps can inform the development of AI agents and automation

Experience Required

• 5+ years of product management experience, with a clear passion for data and/or analytics
• Proven track record of contributing to and delivering data products that drove business impact
• Demonstrated success delivering products where data plays a central role, whether that's data-heavy products that use, collect and surface data, or products that relied on data-informed decisions throughout
• Data literacy, an understanding of SQL and comfortable working alongside data engineers and analysts
• Experience contributing to data governance frameworks or data quality standards
• Experience supporting or mentoring other product managers
• Experience managing stakeholders and communicating effectively across teams
• Evidence of driving data-driven decision making across teams
• Experience working in agile environments at scale
• Domain expertise in retail, hospitality or consumer technology is valuable
• Familiarity with modern data stack tooling (e.g. Snowflake, dbt, Looker, Airflow, or equivalents) is desirable