Director, Insights & Intelligence
Oxford, UK - Hybrid (3 days on site)
Overview
The Director of Insights & Intelligence (I&I) will establish and lead an enterprise capability that enables faster, higher-quality strategic and operational decision-making at Oxford Nanopore. The role owns the operating model for turning market, customer, competitor and business-performance signals into decision-grade insight, working in partnership with Data Services, Finance and functional teams to ensure outputs are based on governed data definitions. The role will lead the executive insight narrative, strategic scorecards, market intelligence capability and decision-support materials used in leadership forums.
This role will partner with existing domain capabilities in Data Services / Business Intelligence reporting, Customer Intelligence / CX, Operations, Finance / FP&A, Marketing / Product / R&D and Commercial. Success requires strong executive-level communication, matrix leadership, and the ability to build a lean capability across analytics, intelligence, research and insight storytelling that delivers insight used in leadership forums and across the organisation.
Responsibilities
- Establish and run an enterprise Insights & Intelligence Centre of Excellence (CoE) supporting corporate planning, performance management and strategic execution.
- Define and govern the KPI dictionary and strategic scorecards: metric definitions, named owners, refresh cadence and change control (in partnership with Finance/FP&A).
- Deliver decision-grade insight for the organisation: executive narratives, decision packs, and reconciled “one version of the truth� outputs for leadership forums (SLT/Board, portfolio/investment cases, Commercial QBRs, Ops reviews).
- Create a prioritisation mechanism (“insights intake�): triage requests, maintain a backlog, and align capacity across the CoE and federated domain teams.
- Build and lead a small core team (analytics, intelligence, customer insight/research, insight storytelling) and coordinate a federated network of domain insight leads across the business.
- Institutionalise Market Intelligence: TAM/segment sizing, competitor & technical/IP tracking (with relevant owners), market trends, pricing inputs and hypotheses to test.
- Partner with Customer Intelligence/CX teams to ensure VoC and research feed into enterprise decisions and prioritisation, with closed-loop learning captured as insight (execution remains owned by the business).
- Partner with Data Services/Data Engineering and Business Systems owners to ensure data access, quality, governance and reporting standards enable self-serve where possible.
- Support scenario modelling, forecasting and investment case development with Strategy and Finance (including inputs into long-range planning).
- Leverage AI-enabled analytics where appropriate (e.g., summarisation, taxonomy/theme extraction, segmentation support, market intelligence) with appropriate privacy and governance controls.
Translate complex analysis into concise, actionable recommendations; champion evidence-based planning and a culture of measurement.
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Requirements
- Experience in genomics, life sciences, or deep tech markets is preferred.
- Experience across strategy analytics, market/competitive intelligence, FP&A/performance management, product management, commercial operations, consulting, or a related discipline.
- Demonstrated experience establishing or scaling analytics/insights/intelligence functions: capability building, stakeholder engagement, hiring, vendor management and tooling.
- Strong customer and stakeholder empathy; able to blend quantitative analysis with qualitative insight and research methods (VoC programmes, surveys, interviews, concept testing).
- Executive-level insight storytelling: ability to turn fragmented data into clear recommendations and to own the narrative in senior forums.
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and influencing through matrix leadership across Commercial, Operations, Product/R&D, Finance and Data/IT teams.
- Practical proficiency with BI tools (Power BI/Tableau), Excel modelling, and modern analytics approaches; experience using AI tools for insight generation is a strong plus.
Familiarity with insights tools/platforms (survey tooling, research platforms, knowledge management/insight repositories, AI tools) is a plus.
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Why this role
This is an opportunity to shape how ONT uses insight and intelligence to steer strategic decisions and deliver on its goals. The role sits at the intersection of executive decision-making, strategy and performance, with high visibility across the organisation.
Please note that no terminology in this advert is intended to discriminate on the grounds of a person's gender, marital status, race, religion, colour, age, disability or sexual orientation. Every candidate will be assessed only in accordance with their merits, qualifications and abilities to perform the duties of the job.
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Oxford Nanopore Technologies: Our goal is to bring the widest benefits to society through enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere. The company has developed a new generation of nanopore-based sensing technology for faster, information rich, accessible and affordable molecular analysis. The first application is DNA/RNA sequencing, and the technology is in development for the analysis of other types of molecules including proteins. The technology is used to understand and characterise the biology of humans and diseases such as cancer, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, and whole environments. With a thriving culture of ambition and strong innovation goals, Oxford Nanopore is a UK headquartered company with global operations and customers in more than 125 countries.
