Senior Director, Category Leadership - Convenience Retail & Customer Shopper Insights

The Coca-Cola Category team seeks a highly skilled leader for our new Convenience Retail and Customer Shopper Insights team. This role is integral to our relationship with our customers, sales teams, and bottling partners.

This is a leadership role responsible for setting strategic direction and day-to-day business requirements for our North America Convenience Retail Customer engagements. This Senior Director will also serve as the central leader for our cross-channel Customer Shopper Insights in a single, coordinated function. This role blends customer-facing category leadership with enterprise-level insight generation to ensure Coca-Cola is positioned to win with shoppers. Success in this role will require accountability in leading a high-performing team, shaping category strategy, stewarding analytic and insight capabilities, and influencing senior Customer and internal stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:

People Leadership:

• Lead and develop a high-performing, multi-disciplinary Category Leadership and Customer Shopper Insights organization.

• Recruit, retain, and grow top talent; build succession plans and strengthen analytical, technical, and strategic capabilities across the team.

• Set clear expectations and foster a culture of accountability, curiosity, inclusion, and continuous improvement.

• Lead and connect geographically dispersed teams.

• Provide strategic leadership for Convenience Retail category growth, serving as a trusted thought partner to senior Customer executives.

• Lead development of category strategies, opportunity assessments, and category blueprints that align shopper needs with Coca-Cola's portfolio priorities.

• Translate complex data into clear, actionable recommendations that influence Customer decisions and drive category growth.

• Partner closely with Sales, Channel Strategy, and other cross-functional teams to embed category strategy into customer business plans.

• Define and own the Customer Shopper Insights agenda with a centralized approach to insight generation that standardizes best practices, and ensures insights are prioritized, actionable, and consistently shape decision-making across Customers and Channels.

• Drive the integration of shopper, Customer, and market data to deliver clear descriptive and diagnostic insights that inform business decisions.

• Enable data agility across Convenience Retail Customer capability platforms and cross-channel Shopper Insights needs to deliver descriptive and diagnostic analytics.

• Advance predictive and forward-looking analytics in partnership with Coca-Cola's Strategic vision in collaboration with Commercial and Strategy counterparts.

• Elevate the role of Customer Shopper Insights as a core capability, ensuring it meaningfully influences category strategy, innovation and Customer engagement.

• Education: MBA Preferred but minimum of bachelor's degree in business or finance

• Experience: Minimum of 10 years' experience in data analysis, consumer insights, category management, and/or space analytics

• Analytical Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to interpret complex data and translate it into actional insights for multiple-stake holders.

• Communication Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to engage and influence stakeholders at all levels.

• Customer Focus: Demonstrated ability to build and maintain strong relationships with customers by understanding their needs.

• Detail-Oriented: High attention to detail at both breadth and depth.

• Advanced analytical capability - ability to draw insights and actions from primary and secondary data sources.

• Specific capabilities with customer specific data sources (84.51, EYC, etc.)

• High level of experience in data providers (Nielsen, IRI)

• High technical skill and aptitude with computer software (MS Office, JDA, Power BI, etc.)

• Demonstrated reputation for customer engagement with ability to positively drive business results.

• Ability to link category leadership strategies to customer strategies.

• Research experience with knowledge of different research techniques, experience in design and management of vendors through project delivery.

• Strong planning capability with the ability to set clear priorities, sequence work effectively, and drive progress against both near-term deliverables and long-term strategic objectives.

• Grows diverse high performing teams through tough-minded talent management and proactively seeks development opportunities for employees.

• Drives organizational performance, efficiency, & effectiveness by translating analytics into actions and results

• Demonstrated ability to lead through change, set clear direction and align teams around a shared vision that drives measurable business impact.