Product Owner - Inventory & Waste

About the Role

This is a senior role, owning one of our product teams. You will own the tools and the process that decide whether what our system says we have is actually what is on the shelf. That covers the full life of a stock movement across both of our sites: procurement, receiving, put-away, transfers, counting, and waste. It also covers the automation around it, from purchase order formulas through our receiving app, the stock count app, and the fresh produce tool.

Why We Are Hiring

• We have grown more than 15x in three years, and we are adding categories, SKUs, suppliers and sites faster every quarter. Our inventory setup was built for a smaller version of this business.
• The gap shows up in ordinary ways. Someone adjusts a stock figure without a clear reason behind it. System and reality are not in sync. Occasionally an item reaches a customer closer to its sell-by date than we would ever want. None of it is dramatic, but we want to fix it as all of it costs us trust, margin and working capital.
• We have a clear view of the process we want. What we have not had is a single person who owns it as a product, with an engineering squad behind them and the mandate to change how it works rather than just enforce it.
• You would be the first person to own this area properly, which means you will shape it rather than inherit it.

What We Need

• We need a real builder. Someone who looks at a messy operational area, sees the structural fix, and ships it once so the team does not have to keep solving the same problem every month.
• When a number looks wrong, we want someone whose instinct is to go and find out why, on the receiving bay if that is where the answer is, rather than to correct it and move on.

Key Responsibilities & Areas of Focus

• Ordering: Own how much we buy, of what, and when. Tune the ordering logic by location, season and category. This is the single biggest lever you will have on both availability and working capital, and it is currently the least developed.
• Receiving and Put-Away: Design how stock enters the building and finds its place: sell-by capture, batch labelling, scanning, and what should happen when the delivery and the paperwork disagree.
• Transfers Between Sites: Make what leaves one site and what arrives at the other agree, with a reason behind every difference.
• Counting: Move us from counting as an event to counting as a habit, and get to the point where a count confirms what we already knew rather than surprising us.
• Waste and Expiry: Expiry dates, temperature records, and catching a short-dated item before a customer does. When quality does fail, make it traceable to a vendor and a batch so we can do something about it.
• The Apps: Receiving, stock counting and fresh produce each have their own tool, used every day by people on their feet in a cold room. You own them, including whether anyone chooses them over a shortcut.
• Hardware Tooling: Printers, scanners and scales that hold up at 6am on a wet floor. Tooling that fails there gets bypassed everywhere else.

How You Will Work

You will act like the owner of this product area, reporting to the COO. That means:

• Setting the strategy and roadmap with the COO and operations leadership.
• Spending real time on the receiving bay, in the aisles, and on the count. The best tools come from understanding the actual workflow, and every process here is judged on the floor.
• Picking the right metrics and being honest about whether you are moving them.
• Writing the specs, prioritising the backlog, working with your engineering squad, shipping, and measuring.
• Defaulting to building in-house, since this is core to how we operate.
• Using AI tools to prototype small internal tools yourself when it makes sense. Turn data into insight into action quickly, without waiting for a full engineering cycle every time.
• Fixing things once. If the same variance is coming up twice, build the structural solution so it does not come up a third time.
• Making sure the team actually uses what you build. If they do not, it is on you to figure out why.

Requirements & Qualifications

• 5-10 years work experience in a highly demanding role (strategy consulting, investment banking, leadership role in corporate, start-up, scale-up).
• Previous experience in product teams or a really keen interest.
• You have shipped internal tools or operational software before, not just consumer features. Even better if it was for supply chain, warehouse, inventory or merchandising teams.
• A background in e-commerce, retail, grocery, logistics, warehousing, or software for any of those is preferred. Perishables experience is a bonus.
• You can reason about replenishment properly. Reorder points, safety stock, days of cover, lead time, MOQs, seasonality, and what a service level actually costs.
• You have owned a catalogue or product master data. SKU setup, hierarchies, barcodes, units of measure, pricing, and what breaks when they are wrong.
• You have tracked availability, out-of-stocks, stock accuracy, shrink or waste as a number you were accountable for, not one you reported on.
• You are comfortable with the commercial consequences: what shrink and waste do to gross margin, and what stock cover does to working capital.
• Technically literate. You can read SQL, sketch a data model, and have a real point of view on how things should be built. ERP experience is a strong plus, Dynamics 365 Business Central especially.
• A structural thinker who designs the system that removes a recurring problem, rather than solving it again each time it appears.
• You can make decisions without perfect information, and you own the outcome.
• You listen well, ask good questions, and operate with low ego. You are willing to be on the floor at 6am when that is where the answer is.

Success Criteria (After 1 Year)

• Nobody keeps a private spreadsheet, because the system is trusted enough that they do not need one.
• No customer receives a short-dated or expired item.
• Measurable improvement on stock accuracy, waste as a percentage of sales, availability, and working capital tied up in stock.
• The receiving, counting and fresh produce tools are used by choice, because they are faster than the workaround.