Category Manager - FMCG/Packed Food/Grocery

Key Responsibilities:

- Understand the needs of the customer.

- 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 bottom line 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

REQUIREMENTS:

- 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