Data & Analytics Lead (Ref: 198305)

Job Title - Data & Analytics Lead (Ref: 198305)

Sector - Retail / Manufacturing

Location - Essex

Contact - [email protected]

About the role

Operating in the sporting goods manufacturing sector, our client develops and brings to market products that support active lifestyles, sporting performance, and consumer participation. The organisation is strengthening its use of digital capability, commercial insight, and operational intelligence as it continues to evolve in a competitive market. Data is becoming increasingly important to understanding customers, improving product and channel performance, and guiding investment decisions. This is an environment where analytics can influence both day-to-day execution and longer-term business direction.

With a broad range of commercial, customer, product, and operational activity to connect, the business is building a more consistent and effective approach to using information. The successful candidate will contribute to that progression by helping establish trusted insight, clearer reporting, and stronger analytical decision-making across the organisation.

Job description

The Data & Analytics Lead will shape how information is governed, interpreted, and applied across a sporting goods manufacturing business. This role combines strategic ownership with practical delivery, covering the development of the analytics roadmap, improvement of business intelligence, and creation of insight that supports commercial, customer, product, and operational priorities.

Working with senior colleagues and stakeholders across the organisation, you will turn complex data into clear recommendations and measurable actions. Success will mean that decision-makers have greater confidence in the numbers, teams can access relevant insight more efficiently, and analytics initiatives are consistently aligned with business outcomes.

The position offers substantial scope to influence data maturity, strengthen reporting standards, and help define the future architecture and capability required for growth. A willingness to move between strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, technical analysis, and hands-on dashboard development will be essential.

Key Responsibilities

• Set the direction for the organisation’s data and analytics strategy, aligning priorities with commercial and operational goals.
• Translate strategic objectives into a sequenced roadmap of reporting, insight, governance, and platform improvements.
• Establish consistent definitions, measures, and reporting standards across customer, product, sales, marketing, and operational data.
• Develop and enhance Power BI dashboards, management information, and self-service analytical products.
• Use SQL and other analytical techniques to investigate performance, identify trends, and expose opportunities or risks.
• Partner with commercial, marketing, product, operations, technology, and finance stakeholders to understand decision-making needs.
• Deliver analysis that supports customer segmentation, retention, personalisation, campaign effectiveness, and channel performance.
• Improve data quality, ownership, documentation, accessibility, and controls across critical information sources.
• Help shape modern data architecture, platform choices, integration priorities, and scalable analytics practices.
• Present findings and recommendations clearly to senior leaders, adapting the message for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Prioritise competing requests and manage delivery against value, urgency, feasibility, and business impact.
• Help develop the organisation’s future data capability through better processes, reusable assets, and effective ways of working.

Requirements

• Significant experience in a Data and Analytics Lead, Analytics Manager, Business Intelligence Manager, or comparable position.
• A strong record of developing and delivering data strategies, analytics roadmaps, or business intelligence transformation programmes.
• Advanced practical capability in SQL, including data extraction, transformation, validation, and analytical investigation.
• Proven experience building effective Power BI dashboards, data models, reports, and visual narratives.
• Familiarity with Microsoft Fabric or a comparable modern cloud data and analytics platform.
• Experience working with commercial, customer, CRM, digital, e-commerce, marketing, product, sales, or operational datasets.
• Ability to convert complex analysis into concise recommendations, clear priorities, and measurable business actions.
• Confident stakeholder management skills, with experience influencing senior decision-makers and balancing differing requirements.
• Demonstrable understanding of data governance, quality management, ownership, lineage, and access controls.
• Capability to operate at both strategic and delivery levels, moving comfortably from roadmap design to hands-on analysis.
• Strong written, verbal, presentation, and facilitation skills.
• Experience delivering analytics within a manufacturing, sporting goods, retail, consumer products, digital, or similarly data-led environment is advantageous.
• Knowledge of customer segmentation, loyalty, retention, personalisation, or lifecycle analytics would be beneficial.
• Exposure to cloud technologies such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform would be valuable.