Innovation ManagerButternut

📣  A bit about the role.  

With big plans for growth and a strong focus on creating market-leading innovative products, this is an opportunity for you to make a significant impact on our physical products, product direction, and the Fresh pet food category. This highly influential role reports to the Director of Product Development. 

This role will work 3 days per week from our West London office (Monday, Wednesday and Thursday) and 2 days from home.

In this role, you can expect to…

• Shape the future of the Fresh pet food category by leading the development of our physical product pipeline for UK and International markets
• Build strong business recommendations, scope new ideas, secure capital, and leverage the quickest routes to market.
• Deliver an engaging program of innovation workshops, inspiration sessions, and directional decision meetings to fuel short, medium, and long-term innovation plans.
• Act as the commercial lead on innovation projects; determining the selling price through customer & competitor research, forecasting sales, understanding if capital investment is required, benchmarking etc.
• Lead customer testing of concepts whether digitally or with physical samples; determining the best approach, measures of success, target audience etc.
• Create compelling, customer-led briefs for our Brand team to bring new products to life through great product marketing and design, as well as for changes to our existing ranges
• Support customer-facing teams (Marketing, Sales, Customer Service) in defining the go-to-market approach for new product launches, campaigns, and training the team.
• Be the 'customer champion' on physical products; ensuring we're staying true to the opportunity identified so that it doesn't get 'watered down', and supporting in-project decision-making.
• Understand performance (customer, commercial, operational) of our complementary product ranges and Fresh meals, proposing range extensions, improvements, reductions and re-positioning, to keep us striving for better
• Be connected to the external landscape by bringing new opportunities to the table, consultancy, innovation tours, product review sessions, customer focus groups, scoping technologies etc.
• Collaborate, build relationships and influence a wide variety of teams, including Brand, Marketing, Commercial, Finance, Product Developers and Operations across our markets.
• Take the lead on identifying ways to improve our approach to innovation at Butternut to deliver new products more quickly and efficiently, whilst always keeping us customer-led
• Travel: Up to 20%. This will mostly be to our kitchens in Doncaster and Poland.

👋  A bit about you.

• Experience product development / innovation and commercial positions.
• A track record in leading innovation, pipelines and bringing big bets to market.
• Strong commercial orientation. You're comfortable analysing market and customer data, digging under the surface to uncover insights, making compelling business recommendations, and ensuring we can profitably bring our ideas to market.
• Desire to identify new ideas and ways of working, encouraging teams to think "outside the box" to make things happen.
• Strong bias for action and delivering results, you have a high degree of personal accountability, a curious mind and an entrepreneurial spirit.
• Strong communicator and leader of others - inspiring them to "go the extra mile".
• Adept at project management and prioritisation, anticipating what's next and involving others in the journey.
• Able to thrive in ambiguity, adapt to change, and navigate complex challenges.
• Excellent communication skills and can quickly gather support for your ideas and champion them with executive-level communication.
• Passionate for innovation, food and delivering an exceptional customer experience.
• Experience within food category preferred.

🐶 A bit about us. 

At Butternut, we put the food back into dog food. We believe dogs deserve to eat the healthiest, most natural and tastiest food with none of the nasties. That’s why we make freshly prepared dog food. Cooked like you would at home. Delivered in perfect portions. #LI-Hybrid

As a B-Corp certified company; you can be sure you are joining a sustainable company who care about our people, product and our impact on the environment.

Our goal is to help dogs live healthier, happier and longer lives whilst leaving humans smiling after every interaction. We’ve come a long way since our co-founders (Kev & Dave) hand-delivered the first Butternut Box, we now feed a lot of dogs across the UK - but we want to feed dogs everywhere. And to do this, we need a team of brilliant people who share that ambition to come and work with us. 

 🙌 A bit about what we offer.

• 25 days holiday (plus 8 bank holidays) and an additional day for every year of service 
• 5 paid 'paws' days per year to support to learning and/or wellbeing
• £500 personal learning & development budget 
• Butternut Box employee discount 
• Enhanced parental leave
• Co-working office space. Flexible working hours and work from home options 
• Cycle to work scheme
• Pension with NEST
• Private Medical Insurance with Vitality
• Dental plan with Bupa
• Gym discount
• Lots of office dogs (Ajax, Brio, Basil, Chorizo, Lenny, Jasper, Peggy, Pip and many more….)

❗️A few things to note: 

• Butternut Box is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity and inclusion. We welcome people of different nationalities, backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.
• As our business has grown so has our responsibility to our community, our planet and our business. We are not perfect, but we are committed to doing business the right way and continually improving our social and environmental performance.
• We're not afraid of putting extra weight on candidates from underrepresented groups. We want strong, diverse teams built from different backgrounds, experiences, and identities. We're ready for the ongoing work that goes into building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best work of your career.
• We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

#LI-Hybrid