Circle Director - eCommerce

Location: UK - Hybrid / Remote Working

A few words about us:

 First things first… What will you become a part of? Valtech is a global digital agency focused on business transformation. We enable clients to anticipate tomorrow’s trends and connect more directly with their consumers across digital and physical touchpoints.

We deliver innovation with a purpose. With expertise across experience design, technology and marketing, our passion is in addressing transformational business challenges for our clients. Challenges where we re-imagine the customer journey and build new connected experiences. Challenges where we make data work in this new era and help our clients transform the way they operate and optimise business-critical digital platforms for multichannel commerce and marketing.

From discovery to optimisation, clients trust Valtech to remove complexity and deliver innovative, frictionless solutions that close the experience gap between customer expectation and reality. We are a network of more than 5,000 makers, thinkers, marketers, creatives, and developers spanning 5 continents with 50+ offices in 22 countries. 

The Role:

As a Circle Director, you’ll be leading your circle to deliver successful projects that give valuable outcomes for Valtech clients. The circle you lead will be focused on a specific client, type of engagement, capability or technology (for which you should be an SME with demonstrable experience) and you will be responsible for annual revenue in the region of £10m-£15m per year.

You’ll be accountable for the revenue, costs and gross margin for your circle as well as ensuring great client outcomes. You will balance priorities and have control of how your circle is organised to best meet demand ensuring the right balance of seniority, skills, domain knowledge and costs. You will be building a team and capabilities for our clients from a mix of permanent UK staff, Valtech global colleagues including our delivery centres and subcontractors ensuring the right balance of specialist skills, costs and resilience.

You will empower your teams and care about team health, happiness and performance. Quality of practice is a high priority and you will be able to draw on practice leadership through senior people in your group, UK craft circles and global communities of practice.

You will achieve your immediate and future targets through close collaboration with the other groups. In particular, you will be expected to be a key part of our qualification and sales process and be responsible for defining and executing a strategy that contributes to the growth of the circle and therefore Valtech.

You will be a visible leader in your industry, a senior member of the global Valtech community and someone passionate about developing teams and shaping Valtech’s future.

This role reports into a Portfolio Lead (Head of Delivery) but will have close relationships with the SMT helping to achieve our OKRs and you will be expected to network within the international Valtech community to join up with those offering similar capabilities and expertise.  

Accountabilities:

• You will be managing the gross margin for your circle (including a view on gross margin at point of sale).
• Providing appropriate financial, delivery and operational information about your circle to the SMT, Finance and Operations.
• Planning and forecasting within your circle, in collaboration with Sales.
• Contributing to Valtech’s success overall, including other circles.
• Improving the quality of practice within your circle and across the business.
• Actively promoting Valtech.
• Overseeing the health and happiness of team members in your circle, measured through our Peakon engagement surveys for UK staff members and by ensuring a culture of 360 feedback with global colleagues. This will include ensuring that the line management function in place in your circle is suitably skilled for the role, doing what is expected of them and that performance and career growth is managed. 

What you’ll do:

• Be an active member of the UK delivery senior leadership team to influence strategy and decision making across the circles, e.g. strategic recruitment planning, staffing deployment resolution, strategic direction of delivery approach and technology.

• People Leadership & Management:

• Be a visible leader of your circle
• Prioritise work being done by your circle (portfolio management)
• Act as the senior point of line management for the circle, setting expectations, objectives and actively managing performance
• Set and communicate roles and responsibilities within the circle
• Actively work to ensure your circle is diverse and inclusive
• Create a safe environment with a strong culture of learning and improvement
• Actively support recruitment by supporting marketing, engaging with local digital communities and supporting the recruitment team
• Delivery & Quality:
• Work with Programme Directors, Technical Directors, Client Partners, peers, practice leads, global craft circles and your international network to assure work done in your circle
• Sales:
• Actively contribute to sales to ensure our capability and delivery success is accurately represented to win new clients and work. Through your own participation (leading and contributing), mobilising your circle to contribute to bids and proposals and collaborating with other Circle Directors
• Work closely with the sales team to bring accuracy and realism to sales forecasts
• As a credible and senior practitioner you will use your network to assist in generating new opportunities
• Performance targets and goals:
• Team utilisation/billability and gross margin
• Team Strategic goals to be agreed with the Head of Delivery and UK SMT

Goals to improve and measure team health and individual’s job satisfaction e.g. staff turnover, professional development

Essential Expertise:

• A minimum of 5 years consulting experience in the commerce domain. Ideally this would be in B2B retail with a solid understanding of the people, processes and tools that make up a typical commerce engagement.
• Experience of delivering business transformation and re-platforming projects and ideally some knowledge of the difference between composable and traditional platform offerings and be able to talk about the approach you’ve taken on programmes of work from inception to delivery and into production.
• Be able to demonstrate previous experience as a leader and line manager bringing people together around a vision and OKRs.
• Be confident to talk about your role in pre-sales and/or account growth and be comfortable engaging with C-Suite stakeholders.

Whilst we offer flexible working and most of our work is now remote, this role will require some travel to our UK offices (London, Bristol, Manchester) for company days, senior leadership team meets and to get to know your circle members and occasionally to client sites. There may be some European travel.  

What can you expect from us:

At Valtech you’ll become part of our exceptional team of more than 5,000 talented innovators, design thinkers, marketers, creatives, and engineers. We interact across countries, disciplines, trades, roles and teams. We are consultants before anything else and take ownership of our own work, clients, and careers. We provide everyone with a large degree of freedom - in return, we expect an equally high degree of accountability and dedication. We transform by doing and insanely passionate about improving the end user experience. We are a people company. We share our knowledge and learnings, we dare to speak up and take risks. And we care deeply about one another, our clients, and the world around us.

We have from our very beginning always worked hard on providing everyone within our organisation the opportunity to grow and transform their job opportunities and career paths across the world. From graduates to seasoned professionals who are experts in their field. Valtech will always be recognised not just for the quality of the work we deliver, but for all the amazing people that make it happen. We don’t just talk about how to get things done; we really do transform by doing. 

Valtech Benefits:

Here at Valtech we’re big believers that our staff are our most important asset, and as such we want to make sure we look after you. As well as all the usual corporate benefits (hybrid & flexible working, pension, life insurance, 25 days holiday, phone, laptop, BUPA private healthcare & dental etc), we pride ourselves on our commitment to continuous learning and development, which means you’ll have a clear growth and development path, alongside access to professional coaching and online learning courses.

You’ll be joining an inclusive and diverse workforce, working on truly exciting projects with collaborative teams at a local and global level, with a big focus on health and social well-being (free office lunches, Cycle to Work Scheme, Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, Flu Jab, regular Company Days and staff parties).

Recruitment Process

We appreciate that interviews can be daunting. At Valtech we aim to make the interview process an approachable, two-way conversation, that allows us to get to know you and for you to get to know us. As part of our efforts to ensure the recruitment process is fair and consistent, we have put in place measures and initiatives to ensure we are not rating people differently due to our own bias.

If you would like to know more about our recruitment framework, click here.

Diversity and Inclusion at Valtech 

At Valtech, we’re here to engineer experiences that work and reach every single person. To do this, we are proactive about creating workplaces that work for every person at Valtech. Our goal is to create an equitable workplace which gives people from all backgrounds the support they need to thrive, grow and meet their goals (whatever they may be).  

As part of this work, we’re sharing an optional anonymous survey with you after your application. This survey will help us better understand the people who apply to work at Valtech. It'll help us see how different demographics progress through our hiring process, and where we need to make improvements to give them a better chance of succeeding. If you choose to fill it out, all of the information you give us is: 

• Voluntary. And we've included a "prefer not to say" option for every question. It'd be helpful if you still fill out the survey even if you choose "prefer not to say" for every question, as it's useful for us to understand & record this. We won't know if you choose to fill this survey in or not
• Anonymous to Valtech. We can't tie your responses to you and they won't make a difference to the outcome of your application. We'll only use grouped responses for equal opportunities monitoring in our hiring process

For more information on how we'll use this data, please read our candidate privacy notice. 

By filling out the survey, you agree that we can use your responses for the purposes we've mentioned above.