Category Leadership

Category Leadership - Head of Product

Managing a portfolio of 4,000 SKUs across retail and trade channels, split equally between manufactured and sourced product, is not a role that lends itself to broad brushstrokes. At that scale, the decisions you make about what stays, what goes, and what gets developed next have real commercial consequences, and getting them right requires a level of rigour that goes well beyond instinct.

When I took on the Head of Product role, the category groupings existed, but there was no formal management framework underpinning them. Products had been added over time in response to opportunities, customer requests, and manufacturing capacity, but without a consistent strategic lens being applied. The result was a portfolio that had grown organically rather than purposefully and one where sourced and manufactured products were, in places, competing with each other rather than complementing one another.

The first thing I introduced was clarity around category roles. Not every product in a portfolio serves the same purpose, and managing a range well means being explicit about what each category is there to do,  whether that is driving footfall and volume, generating margin, or differentiating the brand from competitors. Once those roles were defined, the decisions about what to keep, what to rationalise, and what to develop became considerably more straightforward.

Alongside that, I built a framework for making the manufactured versus sourced decision in a disciplined way. That distinction matters a manufactured product enormously carries fixed cost implications and capacity considerations that a sourced product does not, and without a clear framework, the two can easily end up undermining each other commercially. Getting the balance right, and keeping it right as the market moves, was one of the more complex ongoing challenges of the role.

All category decisions were grounded in sales and margin performance data at the SKU and category level. That sounds obvious, but in a portfolio of 4,000 SKUs  it requires consistent discipline to maintain, and it was that discipline that gave the range review process its credibility internally. Persuading stakeholders to accept rationalisation decisions is rarely straightforward; there is always a commercial history or a customer relationship attached to a product someone wants to protect. Having the data to support the conversation made those discussions more productive and the outcomes more defensible.

Keeping the portfolio relevant across retail and trade simultaneously added another layer of complexity. These are genuinely different channels with different buying criteria, different margin expectations, and different views on what a good range looks like. Developing category strategies that served both without compromising either required a careful and deliberate approach.

The outcome of that work was a portfolio that grew more strategically with a clearer purpose behind every addition and a stronger commercial logic running through the range as a whole. Margin across the portfolio improved as a result, reflecting a range that was better aligned to where the business needed to be commercially and better positioned to serve the customers it was selling to.