IT Manager, West Africa at Unilever

Job Description

• The role leads the whole chain of IT, including the IT Service lines, IT Service Delivery & Global Innovation, within the West Africa Market. You will be responsible for delivering, innovating, and maintaining technology products required to run and grow the business working closely with the leadership team across West Africa and Africa UniOps In-Market Information Technology.
• Role holder will be required to work closely with other Uniops subfunctions: Data and Analytics, Employee experience (HR Operations & workplace operations and Commercial experience (Finance Operations & Supplier operations) to deliver on required services and support to run the whole Uniops in-market operations.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Work with market leadership team, and global team to develop technology strategy and vision
• Provide the voice of the market in identifying and prioritizing key features for technologies including marketing automation, pricing strategy, web analytics, etc.
• Participate in the product and business-planning process across cross-functional teams for all technology products.
• Analyze retailer and partner needs, current market trends, and potential partnerships from an Return on Investment (ROI) and build vs. buy perspective.
• Assess current competitor offerings, seeking opportunities for differentiation.
• Analyze product requirements and develop appropriate programs to ensure it is successfully achieved.
• Appraise new product ideas and strategize appropriate to-market plans.
• Getting feedback into the product and technologies roadmap, including enhanced functionality, potential third-party system additions.
• Facilitate brainstorming sessions to gather project ideas from the other market and develop a pipeline of opportunities
• Input other market point of view on the prioritized list of new functionality and enhancements needed by the business
• Ensure collaborative working and be responsible for market technology's strategy, product roadmap and implementation progress in market to ensure alignment with its business goals.
• Lead your team in capabilities, identifying, comparing, selecting, and implementing technology solutions and partnerships to meet current and future needs.
• Support the creation of detailed product requirements in an Agile environment including user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Work with global product team, IT team and relevant teams to track progress of development and provide early feedback during System Integration Tes (SIT ) and User Acceptance Test ( UAT) that functionality meets needs and objectives of the business.
• Drive the execution of all product lifecycle processes for products, including product research, market research, competitive analysis, planning, positioning, roadmap development, requirements development, and product launch.
• Translate product strategy into detailed requirements for prototype construction and final product development by engineering teams.
• Ensure the product strategy documents provided will describe business cases, high-level use cases, technical requirements, revenue, and ROI.
• Analyze market data to develop sales and adoption strategies for technology products and define product objectives for effective marketing communications plans.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, production, marketing, and sales teams on the development, Quality Assurance and release of products and balance of resources to ensure success for the entire organization.
• Develop product positioning and messaging that differentiates its features across primary market segments.
• Monitor KPIs and IT budgets to assess technological performance.
• Work closely with local Data & Analytics (D&A) team to deliver D&A roadmap and products to bring Business insights into better decisions on deployed technologies and models of reporting.
• Be connected to local tech ecosystem to gain agility in the solutions.
• Lead on compliance to all IT related policies mandated by the IT Operating Framework and escalates all non-compliance to IT Director
• Lead on Disaster Recovery Planning by ensuring all IT related risks/ incidents are handled on time in line with IT policy and procedures and any critical escalation executed on time. 
• Lead on local Uniops in Market IT team people agenda by driving performance management, career planning, development planning and succession planning for team and self.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, computer science or any other related field of study
• Professional qualification in IT E.g. ITIL, Project management certifications, etc preferred.
• 8+ years solid working experience in IT Leadership role in a complex operating environment with at least 3-4 years’ experience in Business Partnering and/or project execution.
• Ability to identify existing and potential risks and development of mitigation plans.
• Self-confident integrity and objectivity/independence of judgement.
• Strong communication and influencing skills; change management.
• Ability to build networks and manage senior stakeholders.
• Ability to hold others, and self, accountable.
• A strong team-player and ability to work in a matrix organization.
• Talent catalyst who can proactively drive the people development agenda.

KEY INTERACTIONS/RELATIONSHIPS

• Africa IT Leadership Team
• West Africa Leadership Team
• Key distributors and customers
• IT Service Line Teams -Internal & external
• Global IT Business Partners and Innovation
• IT Service Delivery Teams-Internal & external
• IT Project Management Team (PMO) covering portfolio delivery and risk.
• West Africa In-Market It Team (Both Full Time Employees and Third-party employees)