Role: Senior In-Stock Manager

Location: Bangalore

About the Role:

As a Senior Instock Manager, you will lead the in-stock strategy and execution for an entire category or program. You will be responsible for driving business growth, improving inventory availability and health, strengthening vendor performance, and building scalable mechanisms that improve operational efficiency. The role combines strategic thinking, deep data analysis, vendor management, automation, stakeholder leadership, and people development.

Key Responsibilities:

- Lead Instock for the Category: Lead all facets of in-stock performance for the complete category or program, ensuring strong availability, inventory health, and operational execution.

- Drive Business Growth: Partner with Finance, Category, and Marketplace leadership to support business growth, profitability, and long-term category performance.

- Subject Matter Expertise: Act as a subject matter expert for specific programs or initiatives across the organization and advocate the adoption of automation, process improvements, and scalable mechanisms.

- People Management: Coach, mentor, and provide effective feedback to direct reports to develop talent, improve performance, and support career development.

- Capability Development: Set and articulate clear, unbiased goals for the team and provide direction to achieve them. Proactively guide, train, and develop team members while sharing knowledge and best practices across the organization.

- Vendor Engagement: Engage regularly with vendor supply chain leadership through weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews to discuss scorecards, instock metrics, common goals, and vendor pain points.

- Demand Planning & Ordering: Determine order quantities by considering forecasts, historical trends, seasonality, price elasticity, and inventory targets.

- Inventory Management: Manage optimal inventory availability and ensure effective inventory replication closer to end customers.

- Define Operational Strategy: Define operational strategy and manage day-to-day operational relationships with vendors to improve efficiency, reduce leakages, improve fill rates, and reduce vendor lead times.

- Deep Dive to Improve Metrics: Leverage existing tools and mechanisms to identify root causes of deviations in vendor supply chain metrics and engage vendors to drive measurable improvements.

- Tracking & Monitoring: Monitor and review category-level instock performance and resolve hotspots by working closely with internal and external stakeholders.

- Drive Efficiency & Inventory Health: Improve efficiency across inventory replenishment and operational processes. Manage overstock and SLOB inventory, design and execute exit strategies for unproductive inventory, conduct RCA on unhealthy inventory generation, and drive corrective action plans.

- Manage Brand Relationships: Independently manage medium to large brands. Build strong vendor relationships and drive performance improvement through regular communication, training sessions, purchase order tracking, investigation of late deliveries, resolution of order rejections, and collaboration on PO automation.

- Automation & Operations Excellence: Drive automation and operations excellence initiatives, including Automated Buying, HOTW initiatives, and Inbound Excellence initiatives.

- Vendor Experience: Resolve vendor pain points by partnering with stakeholder teams to identify root causes and establish scalable processes and mechanisms.

What Will Help You Succeed:

- Automation Champion: Identify opportunities to improve automation by leveraging relevant buying, forecasting, and data tools.

- Communication: Communicate effectively with high-performing internal and external teams and build alignment across stakeholders.

- Stakeholder Management: Build and manage relationships with vendor KAMs and supply chain leaders, regularly review vendor metrics, and identify incremental opportunities to improve instock performance.

- Organizational Skills: Demonstrate strong prioritization, scheduling, time management, and execution skills while meeting deadlines.

- Mechanism Building: Build mechanisms that help teams navigate a demanding and often ambiguous operating environment.

- Business & Vendor Understanding: Develop a deep understanding of vendor vision and plans, align internal strategy accordingly, balance vendor needs with competing business and instock priorities, and drive mutually beneficial outcomes.

- Leadership & Talent Development: Create an environment of high performance, continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and career development for the team.

Required Skills & Experience:

- Professional experience in operations, inventory planning, demand forecasting, supply chain, and/or product life cycles.

- Self-starter with a high level of flexibility, ownership, and commitment.

- Proactive attitude and willingness to roll up your sleeves and dive deep to achieve goals.

- Ability to think, prioritize, and react effectively in a high-energy, fast-paced environment.

- Strong attention to detail with the ability to analyze and work with large volumes of data.

- Strong problem-solving, project management, and analytical skills.

- Ability to translate data and insights into actionable business recommendations.

- Demonstrated experience in leading teams, developing talent, and driving cross-functional initiatives.

Education & Work Experience:

- Full-time MBA or Engineering degree from a premier institution.

- 5+ years of professional experience with a proven track record of managing and executing large projects from start to finish.

- Experience in project management, data gathering and modeling, problem solving, and communicating recommendations.

- Experience managing teams and developing talent is preferred.

- Experience in FMCG, Retail, E-commerce, Supply Chain, or related industries is preferred.

Abilities That Will Help You Shine:

- Walk in our customers' shoes and grow our vendor partners' businesses by anticipating their unexpressed needs.

- Anticipate roadblocks and develop mid- and long-term solutions before they occur.

- Keep experimenting and run pilot programs to evaluate what works best.

- Make timely, data-backed decisions.

- Strive for continuous improvement in processes, mechanisms, and business outcomes.

- Be action-oriented and demonstrate a strong bias for execution.

- Be vocally self-critical and continuously challenge existing approaches to arrive at better solutions.

- Develop and empower high-performing teams through coaching, feedback, and continuous capability development.

Success in This Role:

Success in this role will be measured by your ability to lead category-level in-stock performance, improve product availability and inventory health, drive business growth and profitability, strengthen vendor performance, improve vendor experience, scale automation and operational excellence, and build high-performing teams that deliver sustainable business outcomes.