Product Development Manager - Online Shopping VIP (Enderby or Doncaster)

The Role:

Step into a leadership position where you truly own your team's delivery, operations, and culture. As a Product Development Manager (PDM), you are the accountable delivery and people leader for your development squad.

The Next Online Sale & OpsDev team is responsible for ensuring Sales and promotional events are successfully delivered throughout the year, for Next and our partner’s websites.

Naturally, this includes the flagship Next Sale, run four times a year. Each Sale is a hard deadline, every delivery a truly cross-functional project coordinating with many teams across all of IT at Next, that requires constant refinement and evaluation. You will be a focal point of activity during these times, escalating where necessary and becoming a key player in driving efficiencies and quality of the overall Sale.

In line with the technical nature of the team and Sale processes, you’ll possess a background in development, understanding performant, scalable code, combined with important concepts such as feature flagging and quick delivery cadence. You’ll also understand the value of monitoring and observability, using them to help diagnose issues during all phases of the Software Lifecycle.

These frontline workstreams carry a high mental load and significant commercial value. You will act as the essential translator between the business's strategic intent and your team's technical execution, and the shield that protects your team's focus from external noise. This role is about establishing sustainable delivery rhythms out of volatile demands, embedding quality, and fostering an environment where your developers can do their best work.

What You’ll Take On:

• Delivery Leadership: Own the end-to-end delivery of your team's commitments. You will run projects to Agile standards, actively manage capacity, and continuously balance planned work with complex operational realities.
• People & Culture: Act as the direct line manager and coach for your developers. You will drive their professional growth through Personal Development Plans, foster a collaborative environment, and maintain team momentum.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Build strong, trust-based relationships with Product Owners and business stakeholders. You will translate business requirements into clear scope, validate assumptions early, and proactively communicate progress and risks.
• Process & Quality: Champion our Ways of Working. You will ensure consistent adherence to the Next SDLC, and maintain continuous oversight of system quality and security.
• Cross-Functional Orchestration: Partner with peers across domains to enable smooth delivery of wider initiatives, stepping into gaps pragmatically to unblock flow and ensure shared outcomes succeed.
• Sustainable Workload Management: Treat workload as a visible, actively managed constraint. You will challenge unrealistic estimates, push back on unsafe planning expectations, and use data to protect team health.

What You’ll Bring:

This role requires a leader who is able to hit the ground running. The environment is fast-paced and demands immediate competency in navigating shifting priorities without passing that stress onto the team. You must balance a sharp focus on delivery outcomes with genuine empathy and strong people leadership skills. Because this is an internal role, you will already understand the pace of our eCommerce environment, but you are someone who wants to shape how we work just as much as what we deliver.

• Strong, technical experience from your previous development roles, which you will bring to bear on complex technical issues around performance and scalability.
• Immediate, proven capability in a technology delivery environment (e.g., as a Lead Developer, Scrum Master or existing manager) with a strong practical grasp of Agile methodologies and continuous improvement.
• A track record of stepping into complex environments to build collaborative, psychologically safe teams and resolve ambiguity through constructive, clear communication.
• The confidence, resilience, and commercial awareness to have honest conversations with senior stakeholders, specifically the ability to manage expectations in a high-stakes environment.
• Experience managing volatile operational demands alongside planned project work, with a calm, methodical approach to incident leadership and risk mitigation.
• A strong intrinsic drive to coach others, share knowledge, and elevate the overall capability of your team and the wider Online Shopping domain.

#LI-LE1 #LI-Hybrid

Benefits

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Profit-related bonus - based on company performance
• Management share options
• Company car or car allowance
• Private medical insurance
• Sharesave scheme - make savings from your net pay to buy NEXT shares at a discount
• Pension - fixed contribution rates from both an employer and employee perspective, but you're also able to make additional voluntary contributions (AVCs) if you wish to save more.
• Life assurance
• Group income protection
• Wagestream - helping you make the most out of your money
• Salary finance - offers access to affordable loans repaid through salary, simple savings and free financial education.
• 25% staff discount on most NEXT products - plus discount on other products
• Direct to work - NEXT orders delivered free to the office for collection
• VIP sale - early access to the NEXT sale
• Access to NEXT staff shops
• Octopus energy - like cycle-to-work, but for electric vehicles
• Free parking (excluding London locations)
• Travel2NEXT - bus services dependent on location
• On site dining facilities (excluding London locations)
• National and local discounts on goods and services - this includes things like discounted cinema tickets
• Wellhub - includes access to discounted gym membership
• Simply health - a healthcare subscription service
• Aviva Digicare Workplace+ healthcare service - 7 Free services including Digital GP appointments and an annual health check.
• Onsite GP - Leicester Head Office
• Onsite Physio - Leicester Head Office
• A range of dedicated 3rd party wellbeing partners
• Free eye testing - voucher to use at specific locations

Conditions apply to all benefits. These benefits are discretionary and subject to change.

We aim to support all candidates during the application process and are happy to provide workplace adjustments when necessary. Should you need support with your application due to a disability or long-term condition, feel free to get in touch with us by email [email protected] (please include 'Workplace Adjustments' in the subject line), or call us on 0116 284 2486 and leave a voicemail.