Programme Leader

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced Programme Leader with extensive Salesforce Marketing Cloud transformation experience within the retail sector to join a leading UK retailer on an initial six-month contract.

This is a high-profile, business-critical programme at a pivotal stage of delivery. The successful candidate will take overall leadership and accountability for the final phases of a large-scale Salesforce Marketing Cloud transformation, overseeing a phased rollout across multiple well-known consumer brands over the next six months.

This is a senior programme leadership role requiring an individual who can take control, establish clear direction and drive the programme through to successful delivery. You will inherit an established programme and will be expected to quickly assess the current landscape, identify areas requiring intervention and establish the governance, leadership and delivery discipline required to achieve the programme’s strategic objectives.

You will hold overall responsibility for programme execution, ensuring that all work streams are aligned to the overarching roadmap and that key milestones, dependencies, risks and business outcomes are actively managed. You will provide the leadership and challenge required across delivery teams, ensuring issues are surfaced early, decisions are made at the appropriate level and corrective action is taken quickly where required.

Operating at a senior leadership level, you will provide end-to-end programme direction and oversight, working across technology, marketing, digital, e-commerce and wider business functions. You will establish and maintain effective programme governance, ensuring there is clear accountability across all work streams and delivery partners. This will include oversight of programme plans, milestones, dependencies, risks, issues, financial considerations, resourcing and delivery performance.

You will be expected to challenge existing assumptions and delivery approaches, identify areas of concern and provide senior stakeholders with clear options and recommendations to enable timely decision-making. The role will require strong leadership across a complex ecosystem involving a Global Systems Integrator, Salesforce Professional Services, internal technology teams and multiple business and executive stakeholders. You will ensure that onshore and offshore teams are working as one integrated programme and that all parties remain focused on the agreed business outcomes.

A deep understanding of Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementations and enterprise CRM transformation within a retail environment is essential. While this is not a hands-on configuration role, you will need sufficient technical depth and credibility to engage confidently with Salesforce architects, developers, technical leads and delivery specialists. You will be expected to challenge technical and delivery decisions where appropriate, understand complex dependencies and assess the potential business and programme impact of issues.

Your experience will enable you to distinguish between delivery noise and genuine programme-critical risks, ensuring that senior stakeholders receive clear and commercially and operationally relevant information rather than simply a status report. You will oversee the programme through multiple critical go-live phases, ensuring appropriate readiness across technology, data, integrations, marketing operations, customer journeys, business processes and change.

A significant element of the role will be senior stakeholder and executive engagement. You will build credibility quickly with programme sponsors, senior business leaders, technology leadership and other executive stakeholders, providing clear and confident communication on programme progress, risks, decisions and outcomes.

You will be comfortable operating in a fast-paced retail environment where customer experience, commercial performance, trading priorities and business change can create competing demands on technology programmes. You will bring the ability to influence without authority, challenge constructively and facilitate difficult decisions when required. You will also act as a trusted senior point of escalation, ensuring that programme issues are appropriately managed and that stakeholders have confidence in the delivery strategy and execution.

The successful candidate must have a strong track record of working within the retail sector
, ideally having delivered significant Salesforce, CRM, Marketing Cloud, customer experience or digital transformation programmes for a retailer or consumer-facing organisation.

You will understand the specific challenges of delivering technology change within a retail environment, including complex customer journeys, multiple brands or channels, e-commerce, customer data, marketing operations,…