Digital Products and Experience Lead – Africa Digital Hub

Job title: Digital Products and Experience Lead – Africa Digital Hub 

Level: Senior Level Management

About us  

Diageo was created in 1997 but its business is built on the principles and foundations laid years before by giants of the industry – Arthur Guinness, John Walker, Elizabeth Cumming and many more. Today, Diageo is a world class leader in beverage alcohol, producing an outstanding collection of over 200 brands and owning the top two largest spirit brands in the world, Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff and 20 of the world’s top 100 spirit brands. Its portfolio also includes Mortlach, Singleton and Talisker Malt Whiskies, Cîroc and Ketel One vodkas, Captain Morgan, Baileys, Don Julio, Tanqueray and Guinness. 

Diageo has built a strong platform for growth – through investment in its own brands, and by acquisition to broaden the geographical footprint and category depth and range. The company’s strong local business units are well-positioned to win in increasingly competitive and fast-paced environments. Diageo’s portfolio is well-diversified across price-tiers, enabling it to participate where consumer opportunity is greatest, and to capture shifts in consumer preference. 

Diageo's culture is built and maintained by the five values that underpin its business and guide how Diageo works. At Diageo, employees are passionate about its customers and consumers and want to be the best. They give each other the freedom to succeed and value each other. Employees work hard so they can be proud of what they do and how they do it. While Diageo moves at pace, constantly evolving and improving, its values remain consistent. Diageo wants that employees live these values every day, everywhere so that Diageo can be proud of what they do and be the best that they can be. 

About role  

Our ambition is to transform Diageo into a digital-first organization, enabling our brands to engage directly with consumers like never before. Our vision is to win in the next generation celebration, engaging and delighting our consumers with world-class leading experiences across every physical and digital touchpoint. 

The transformation will reinforce Diageo brands’ equity with an audacious plan focused on: 

• Telling our brands’ story through all consumers’ touchpoints, with personalized experiences at scale 

• Improving our presence on the digital space, magnifying the execution of our brands’ promise into a seamless omnichannel experience, spreading NSV across multiple sources (B2C, B2D2C, D2C) 

• Knowing intimately our end consumers by leveraging collected first party data, responsibly 

To deliver this vision, Diageo is evolving its organization with a new operating model that requires experienced leaders. This role sits within the newly created Africa Digital Hub 

Purpose of role 

• The purpose of this role is to enable markets to maximize our exciting network of websites (from our brand home sites to full-fledged D2C sites like thebar.com 

• You will do this by ensuring all websites a) have the best consumer experience possible and b) are managed to the highest reputational standards. 

• Acting as an extension of markets, and partnering with our Marketing, Commercial, D&T, Legal functions (and agencies), you will ensure platforms are set up to deliver stand-out UX as part of a clear owned destination strategy. 

• You will upload portfolio content that will help increase the overall quality score of the websites and will serve as the destination for our paid and organic search. Furthermore, you will action the technical SEO recommendations that will make our websites index seamlessly in Google search. 

• You will take responsibility for the delivery of core parts of the process, ‘heavy lifting’ on behalf of all European markets. This includes building user journeys to increase conversion rate, best in class check-out experiences, technical SEO amends, privacy policies, data collection forms and more. 

• Success in this role will be defined by improved google quality score and increased consumer sign-ups (consumer engagement) and website conversation rate (D2C growth) through your hands-on interventions. 

Role responsibilities   

• You will be a champion of consumer experience. You will ensure that websites are used at all levels of the consumer path to purchase, and that the content present on these websites is fit for purpose. 

• You will use your knowledge to set a standard for user experience (UX) on our websites from landing on a homepage, browsing a product page to booking their distillery visit. 

• In your thinking around best-in-class user experience you will implement user journeys on the websites that reduce abandon basket, consumer churn and ultimately increase website revenue. 

• You will implement a sign-up experience that is seamless and inviting for users. 

• You will manage the regular technical updates on market websites that are essential to win in organic and paid search – this includes the correct naming conventions, website structure, indexing and more. 

• You will manage the multiple agencies required to enact technical changes on the websites, clearly assigning roles and responsibilities to the different stakeholders. 

• You will plot all of Diageo’s websites into a clear ecosystem to understand where there are cross-over / redundancies and where there are gaps / opportunities and reduce the complexity of making changes on websites and add agility to the process of keeping our websites best in class with regards to content and technical updates. 

• You will be an advocate of compliant website management – ensuring that the best practices on age-gating, privacy policies and data collection are present across all of Diageo’s websites. 

• Effectively tag our websites so that our media agencies and insights teams may harvest learnings from our owned properties and use actions that take place on our websites in our digital performance media. 

Qualifications, Knowledge, and Experience 

• Educated to a graduate/university level. 

• 10 years in digital with experience in UX/Websites, creative and product management  or related field. 

• Technical SEO experience – you understand that Google adverts are only as good as the landing pages where they are sent to and know how to implement technical audits to improve the structure of the site. 

• A subject matter expert on websites. You understand UX (User Experience), conversation rate optimization, bounce rates and more. 

• You have strong working knowledge of CDP and CRM systems and know how to get the most of these technologies. 

• Experience with Analytics, content management and privacy consent. 

• You let the data do the talking. You understand how to make sense of Google Analytics and other tools to understand how consumers with our websites and make insight-driven tools. 

• You have technical expertise in website software and infrastructure and can discuss these topics comfortably.  

• You understand that websites require multiple disciplines working together; creative, brand, technical, content and development. You are a collaborator that can bring all those disciplines together working in the same direction.