Head of Product Management and Innovation

Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters - Suchali's Artisan Bakehouse - Got Tea

Why this role exists:

Our coffee, food and bakery portfolio depends on strong specialists. The business now needs one leader to convert their expertise into a disciplined product pipeline and carry each priority from concept through launch, scale and customer adoption. This role owns that journey, resolves cross-functional dependencies and ensures that innovation produces commercially sound, repeatable outcomes.

Role summary:

The Head of Product Management and Innovation in the level of a Vice President leads the portfolio and programme management of new and improved products across brands - Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters, Suchali's Artisan Bakehouse and Got Tea. The role manages a team of category specialists and brings together Café operations, Supply chain, FMCG, and Marketing, to deliver each program. The role is accountable for pace, economics, launch readiness, scalability and post-launch performance. It does not replace culinary or coffee expertise; it creates the system in which that expertise reaches customers successfully.

Reporting and Decision authority:

- Reports to the CEO/Founder and function as a senior cross-functional business leader.

- Leads the Product Development and curation specialists across Coffee, Food and Bakery.

- Owns the product portfolio, programme cadence and stage-gate governance across brands and channels.

- Recommends "go, hold, rework, scale or stop" decisions using customer, operational and financial evidence.

- Escalates only the decisions that require leadership investment, risk acceptance or a change in strategic priority.

Key responsibilities:

- Portfolio and roadmap - Translate business priorities, category opportunities and customer needs into a balanced product roadmap. Maintain one view of initiatives, capacity, investment and expected value.

- Program ownership - Convert approved ideas into clear charters, workplans, milestones, owners, dependencies, risks and decision points. Keep multiple programmes moving without losing product quality or commercial discipline.

- Business case and prioritization - Assess demand, unit economics, margin, price architecture, investment, complexity and channel potential before resources are committed. Make trade-offs visible and recommend where the business should focus.

- Development and validation - Enable category specialists to prototype and test products against an agreed brief. Ensure that customer feedback, quality standards, sourcing feasibility and operational constraints shape the product before launch.

- Launch and scale readiness - Coordinate supply, production, packaging, training, technology, marketing, quality and cafe execution. Confirm that the product can be produced and served consistently at the required volume and economics.

- Customer adoption and lifecycle management - Define success measures before launch, review customer response and business performance after launch, and decide whether to improve, expand, simplify or retire the product.

- Systems and continuous improvement - Build simple, auditable tools for briefs, stage reviews, risk tracking, launch readiness and post-launch learning. Use root-cause analysis to improve the development system over time.

- Team and stakeholder leadership - Set clear priorities for specialists, create accountability across functions and facilitate timely decisions where teams have competing goals.

Product journey owned by the role:

The role applies a consistent decision process while allowing the technical development method to vary by category.

1. Discover:

- Customer problem, trend, category gap and strategic fit - Is the opportunity worth defining

2. Define:

- Product brief, target customer, channel, economics, risks and success measures - Approve the business case and resources

3. Develop:

- Specialist-led prototyping, sourcing, costing, quality and operational design - Is the product ready for a live pilot

4. Validate:

- Controlled pilot with customer, operational and financial evidence - Rework, stop or approve launch

5. Launch and scale:

- Cross-functional rollout with supply, training, quality and channel readiness - Release scale investment and expansion

6. Learn and optimise:

- Performance review, customer response and root-cause analysis - Improve, expand, simplify or retire

How success will be measured:

- Portfolio value - Revenue, gross margin and contribution from products launched or materially improved

- Delivery reliability - Percentage of priority programmes delivered to the approved scope, timing and investment

- Time to market - Cycle time from approved brief to launch, tracked by product type

- Launch quality - Operational readiness, product consistency, availability and issue rate during rollout

- Customer response - Trial, repeat, rating, complaints and other agreed customer measures

- Scale performance - Ability to sustain quality, service time, supply and economics as volume expands

- Portfolio discipline - Speed and quality of decisions to scale, rework or stop underperforming products

Candidate profile:

- Experience - Approximately 10 to 14 years in product development, program management, Commercial business delivery role with substantial delivery ownership.

- Relevant sectors - Experience may come from fast paced Consumer products, retail, FMCG, e-Commerce, QSR, or another equivalent environment that takes physical products from concept to repeatable delivery in a fast-paced product life cycle. Direct food and beverage experience is useful but not essential.

- Track record - Evidence of leading several cross-functional product or transformation programmes from an unclear starting point to measurable customer and business outcomes.

- Commercial judgement - Comfort with business cases, unit economics, pricing, margin, investment choices and portfolio trade-offs.

- Engineering mindset - Able to break complex problems into requirements, dependencies, risks, tests and measurable decisions. Uses data and root-cause analysis without allowing process to become bureaucracy.

- Leadership - Can lead specialists whose technical depth may exceed their own, ask rigorous questions and create accountability without becoming the category expert or chef.

- Education - An engineering, operations, product or business qualification or Project Management certification is desirable. Demonstrated problem-solving and delivery capability matter more than a specific degree.

This role will suit someone who:

- Enjoys turning promising ideas into products that customers choose repeatedly and the business can scale profitably.

- Moves comfortably between a product brief, a project plan, a customer test, an operating review and a commercial discussion.

- Values technical and culinary expertise but does not need to be the person creating every recipe or coffee profile.

- Brings structure to ambiguity, makes decisions with incomplete information and changes course when evidence requires it.

First 90 days:

- Days 1 to 30 - Map the active portfolio, decision rights, team capacity and major handoff failures. Establish baseline measures for cycle time, launch quality and product performance.

- Days 31 to 60 - Agree the portfolio priorities and implement the stage-gate approach on selected live programmes. Introduce a common product brief, risk review and launch-readiness process.

- Days 61 to 90 - Run the first portfolio review with evidence-based decisions, publish the next two-quarter roadmap and confirm improvement actions for the product development system.