Director Franchise Strategy, Independent Bottlers

Role Purpose

This leadership role is accountable for supporting and constructively challenging the Franchise organisation to translate enterprise and OU commercial strategy into market-level, executable actions across Independent Bottlers.
The role acts as a strategic integrator across Franchise, Integrated Operations (IB), Bottlers, and OU Leadership, ensuring end-to-end alignment, disciplined execution, and continuous learning to drive sustainable growth.

What You'll Do for Us

Strategic Integration & Execution

• Partner closely with Integrated Operations (IB) teams to co-define, calibrate, and refine execution strategies based on market realities and bottler capabilities.
• Work with Franchise leadership to lead system-wide end-to-end alignment with Independent Bottlers at the local and market level.
• Act as a thought partner to Franchise Leads-alignment ownership remains with the Franchise Lead, while this role stewards rigor, clarity, and pace.

• Pull together data, analytics, and market insights to identify granular growth opportunities across channels, customers, and geographies.
• Translate insights into clear, actionable commercial levers that can be executed at the bottler and frontline levels.
• Use a fact-based, hypothesis-driven approach to challenge assumptions and sharpen local commercial strategies.

• Identify, frame, and conduct preliminary evaluation of strategic initiatives that support Franchise and system growth objectives.
• Own and manage the Franchise strategic project portfolio, partnering with Franchise teams, IB, and OU functions to drive outcomes.
• Ensure disciplined project governance-clear objectives, success metrics, timelines, and accountability.

• Objectively assess successes and failures of strategic initiatives.
• Capture learnings and systematically feed insights back into future strategies and projects, strengthening institutional capability over time.
• Build mechanisms to network best practices, importing and exporting scalable ideas across markets and bottlers.

• Partner with the OU Leadership Team (OULT) on business-critical, enterprise-level initiatives, bringing a system lens and execution rigor.

• Mastery in developing compelling, actionable consumer and commercial insights at market level.
• Ability to convert strategy into clear execution roadmaps with measurable commercial impact.
• Strong capability to manage ambiguity, complexity, and multiple senior stakeholders across the KO System.
• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, particularly in bottler-facing environments.
• Role-model 'Leadership in the Network'-collaborative, inclusive, enterprise-first mindset.

• 8+ years of progressive experience in Operations, Commercial Strategy, Franchise, or related business roles.
• Proven leadership track record, including leading teams and influencing senior leadership forums.
• Experience working in complex, matrixed, and culturally diverse environments.
• Strong analytical orientation combined with practical, execution-focused thinking.

• Extensive engagement with senior leaders across the KO System, including high-stakes discussions and negotiations with bottlers.
• Exceptional storytelling, presentation, and influencing skills-able to align diverse stakeholders around shared outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to tailor messaging to different audiences, balancing strategic depth with operational clarity.
• Comfortable navigating sensitive, high-context situations with maturity and commercial acumen.