Consumer Planning Manager - Breakthrough Innovation

Breakthrough Innovation: Consumer Planning Manager

This is an exciting new global position to join the Breakthrough Innovation team as a Consumer Planning Manager, playing an important role in supporting the Global Head of Strategic Planning and Insights in leading, shaping, enabling and delivering Diageo's Breakthrough Innovation Agenda across four strategic pillars: Next Gen TBA, Transformational Convenience, Premiumisation & Personalisation and Sustainability. This requires expansive and experimental innovation to develop, learn and assess new ideas beyond our current capabilities, portfolios and core business delivery systems. It is in service of two interlinking business imperatives - our growth ambitions AND in meeting our Society 2030 mission.

DIMENSIONS OF THE ROLE

This role reports into the Global Head of Strategic Planning and Insights and is accountable for putting the consumer at the heart of the BI agenda both in identifying, developing and testing opportunities.

This role will have three key dimensions:

• Partner with the Breakthrough Innovation Managers across the 'Tranformational Convenience' and 'Premiumisation & Personalisation' pillars to ensure consumer-centric thinking is at the heart of their projects from opportunity identification to proposition development, testing and delivery.
• Champion creativity within the team in how we bring propositions to life, supporting the team in unlocking opportunities in the most creative ways including concept development.
• Support the Global Head of Strategic Planning and Insights to lead the business in unlocking powerful new ways of delivering current and future consumer understanding, translating these into breakthrough ideas and creating the agile, iterative testing using agile and emerging methodologies (including AI) required to learn.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Support Project Managers in the relevant teams by being the consumer planning champion, ensuring their projects are:

a). Strategically grounded in rich current and future consumer understanding

b). Creatively imagined with consumer centricity at the heart of their propositions and business models, leading best practice creative concept development thinking

c.) Build strong learning plans for the strategic platforms/projects at each stage of the Ignite process with cutting edge agile, iterative and emerging testing solutions that are effective and efficient, to provide appropriate challenge, analysis and insight that links consumer insights to business opportunities to make informed decisions

2. Support the Head of Strategic Planning and Insights to implement and continuously improve the Breakthrough Innovation Planning framework and capabilities that encompasses both data driven approach to future strategy and exploration agenda for Breakthrough Innovation

3. Support the Head of Strategic Planning and Insights in creating cross-platform insights' solutions, establishing best in class insights, tools and processes to lead strategic platform development, shape pipelines and respond to the complexity of each platform

4. Contribute to foresights generation, for example by supporting trend mapping, scenario inputs, external partner learning, or synthesizing foresight outputs into project implications.

5. Manage cross functional teams to implement new research methodologies that unlock powerful consumer insights

LEADERSHIP RESPONSIBILITIES

• Champion the Breakthrough agenda within the business and ensure breakthrough planning is continuously expanding boundaries and capabilities to deliver transformation growth to the business.
• Identify consumer driven future opportunities and translate these insights into actionable plans for relevant strategic pillars.
• Build a sustainable and vibrant consumer culture across the Breakthrough innovation team, supporting team wellbeing through ambiguity, and contributing to a positive culture.
• Create the conditions to enable novel solutions, from experimentation to continuously test and learn
• Build strong internal interdependencies (Innovation, Consumer Planning, R&D, GBT, Digital Transformation, D2C, key global markets) in service of agile delivery of breakthrough innovations and new business models
• Build strong relationships with the Global Culture and Futures Planning team, to translate preferable futures into programmes and projects to align the pipeline of Breakthrough Innovation to the company strategy

EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

• 6+ years' experience in innovation, insights, planning, preferably with experience in delivering breakthrough, disruptive or novel products / capabilities within established organisations
• Ability to powerfully generate and use insights to create winning strategies coupled with an ability to demonstrate good creative judgement
• Strong analytical, systems thinker able to create credible strategies from a blank page, translating the unknown into real business practices
• Strong influencing skills and ability to work across teams and functions
• Evidence of working comfortably in a highly ambiguous environment, balancing multiple project and assigning priorities

• Passionate about both shaping the future and consumers
• Creative flair to translate strategies into exciting and tangible consumer propositions that can shape the future of the business
• Broad experience, from products through to digital desirable
• Entrepreneurial spirit, a curiosity and desire to think and do things differently.

Key Stakeholders

• Breakthrough Innovation Director and Leadership Team
• Breakthrough Innovation teams
• R&D
• Consumer Planning community
• GBT's/Markets

Enablers to Success in Role

• Innovative and creative but also intellectually rigorous in the thinking - the authority on both the art and the science of Planning
• Strong communication skills, able to seamlessly influence across multiple stakeholders (internally and externally)
• Balances autonomy with advice seeking and collaboration with goal achievement
• Highly collaborative
• Curious and very externally engaged

Celebrating our inclusive and diverse culture is core to Diageo's purpose of "celebrating life every day everywhere". This purpose is, in itself, inclusive in nature, as it values everybody irrespective of background, disability, religion, gender identity, sexuality or ethnicity.

We know that for our business to thrive and for Diageo to realize its ambition, we depend on having diverse talent with a range of backgrounds, skills and capabilities in each of the 180 countries in which we operate and to reflect our broad consumer base. We view diversity as one of the key enablers that helps our business to grow and our values, purpose and standards set the conditions for us to respect the unique contribution each person brings.

Flexibility is key to success in our business and many of our staff work flexibly in many different ways, including part-time, compressed hours, flexible location. Please talk to us about what flexibility means to you and don't let anything stop you from applying.

Character Is Everything

Client-provided location(s): London, United Kingdom, New York, NY

Job ID: Diageo-JR1121769

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

Posted: 2026-01-27T18:57:13