Category Manager - FMCG (4-10 yrs)

Category Manager with one of the leading organization

Experience: 4+ years

Location: Bangalore

Key Responsibilities:

Making FMCG buying destination (online and offline) for Kirana retailers all across India. Driving aggressive and profitable growth in customer (Kirana retailer) base, topline, bottom-line and NPS for the Super Category.

In order to do this, you will need to:

- Understand the needs of the customer based on.

- Visits to customers, interactions with customer facing teams, focus groups, customer delight tickets etc.

- Analysis of competing offerings available to the customers (across multiple offline and online channels).

- Analysis of on-app behavior of customers (search, traffic, conversion funnel etc).

- Understanding of market trends and factors shaping customer demand and industry dynamics.

- Use this understanding to define the customer value proposition and the entire experience for the customer w.r.t. to the category.

- Create a category strategy and use this to develop annual category plans at overall category and city/regional levels based on top-down and bottom-up inputs.

- Translate into detailed and actionable monthly category plans with clearly defined owners and checkpoints.

- Own execution of annual and monthly category plans to drive topline and bottomline goals.

- Define the selection/assortment required to serve the needs of the target customer and work with Category Buyers to list these products and drive their consistent availability on the platform.

- Work with Central Marketing to drive the right traffic to the Super Category and from there to individual categories.

- Improve discovery of the right products and drive higher conversion rates.

- Work with the Catalog and Products teams to improve catalog quality & showcase attributes to help customers make better and faster buying decisions.

- Work with Product teams to improve organic category navigation and search.

- Own creation and execution of targeted promotions & campaigns Track.

Campaign performance daily and work with merchandising and marketing teams to improve ROI.

- Work with Business Operations and Price Benchmarking teams to build a robust price benchmarking process (offline and online) and ensure competitive pricing.

- Own the Category P&L and customer experience.

- Provide accurate demand projections to Category Buyers to ensure consistent availability and reduction of slow/non-moving inventory and liquidation losses.

- Provide regular inputs to category buyers to help them drive high ROI investments for brand partners to achieve their strategic objectives.

- Drive on-going improvements in customer experience pertaining to the category by clearly translating customer requirements for product, supply chain and buying teams.

- Create a robust process for quickly identifying and highlighting any quality issues relating to product quality or customer experience.

- Work with city and regional level Customer Growth teams to drive city/ regional level goals on overall growth and profitability.

- Hire, train and mentor a team (Category planning, category marketing and category managers) to execute this strategy across 50-100 cities across India.

REQUIREMENTS:

- We are looking for leaders at all levels who have the hunger to work with some of the smartest people, who are driven by a sense of purpose, and who wish to leave a legacy in their respective domains and among their professional fraternity.

- We are not just building apps or tech platforms, but rather building distributed ecosystems connected through intelligent technology that can change the face of the food and grocery consumption pipelines in India, forever, for the better.

Required skills and Experience:

Must have:

- 4- 10 years of overall experience with at least 3+ years of category/ P&L management in e-commerce marketplaces.

- 2+ years of experience in hiring and developing teams from top tier institutions.

- Sound business judgment and an ability to evaluate and manage multiple competing priorities using metrics and data.

- Strong planning and analytical skills with advanced proficiency in Excel and exposure to large datasets.

- High attention to detail and willingness to dive deep into data.

- Willingness to go into the field to visit kirana retailers.

- Excellent communication and negotiation skills - Ability to influence a variety stakeholders without relying on positional authority.

- Ability to create robust, scalable and repeatable processes for category management.

- Experience working with product and technology teams as their primary business stakeholder.

- Ability to work independently with limited support in a fast-paced, high growth environment.

Preferred:

- FMCG sales/ brand marketing/ strategy consulting/ entrepreneurial experience.

- SQL/ R / Python proficiency.

- Passionate about food and grocery.

We would like to hear from candidates who have the hunger to impact real lives and who can match our high bar on Core Values that we live by.

If you:

- Can apply first principles thinking to solve problems

- Can envision a great future that you want create

- Have the fire in your belly to get out of your cube and do something about your vision and passion

- Want to work with some really smart people, and still raise the bar for all of us

- Can have fun and help your colleagues have fun doing all of the above.