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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A track record of stepping into complex environments
to build collaborative, psychologically safe teams and resolve ambiguity through constructive, clear communication.
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The confidence, resilience, and commercial awareness
to have honest conversations with senior stakeholders, specifically the ability to manage expectations in a high-stakes environment.
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Experience managing volatile operational demands
alongside planned project work, with a calm, methodical approach to incident leadership and risk mitigation.
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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
You know Next, but did you know we’re a FTSE-100 retail company employing over 44,000 people across the Next group. We’re the UK’s 2nd largest fashion retailer and for Kidswear we’re the market leader. At the last count we have over 450 stores, plus the Next Online and it’s now possible to buy on-line from over 80 countries around the world! So we’ve gone global!
