SVP – Digital and Customer Platforms — Food And Beverage Platform

The mandate

The group reaches households through modern retailers, independent outlets, food-service operators, distributors and a growing set of delivery and marketplace partners. Each channel has acquired digital capabilities at a different pace. Retail account teams use several customer-planning tools, distributors submit stock and sell-out information in inconsistent formats, and food-service customers move between assisted ordering, messaging applications and local portals. Meanwhile, marketplace data arrives quickly but seldom reconciles to product, customer and promotion hierarchies used by finance. The result is activity without a dependable view of customer economics or a coherent experience for the people who buy, stock and serve the portfolio.

The SVP – Digital and Customer Platforms will turn that collection into an intentional commercial system. The mandate joins product management, platform engineering, data integration, customer experience, digital commerce enablement and technology partnerships. It does not absorb sales, revenue management or brand marketing. Instead, the SVP will make their decisions faster and more precise by providing usable workflows, trustworthy data and channel capabilities that reflect how each customer actually operates.

This is a leadership role for a business transition, not a mandate to launch a generic direct-to-consumer storefront. In several markets, distributors and retailers are indispensable sources of reach, credit and service. In others, digital ordering and rapid-delivery partners are altering assortment, promotion and availability expectations. The executive must identify where the group should own the customer interface, where it should integrate with a partner, and where a digital intervention would add cost without changing a valuable outcome.

Scope and operating context

Based in Dubai, the SVP will lead an ecosystem of approximately 875 employees and material partners across the United Arab Emirates and the broader international operating region. Direct teams include platform product leaders, architects, engineers, experience designers, commercial-data specialists, service operations and programme leadership. Important delivery capacity also sits in shared technology functions, market teams and specialist vendors; influence across those boundaries will be as important as line authority.

The existing landscape contains regional portals, distributor applications, sales tools, promotion systems, content repositories and numerous local integrations. Some meet genuine regulatory, language or route-to-market needs; others persist without an economic case. The board expects fewer durable capabilities with explicit local-extension rules, not forced uniformity or another layer over fragmentation.

Customer data creates a distinct challenge. Account, outlet, menu, product and campaign identities do not align across channels, and consent or contractual use rights vary by market and partner. The SVP will work with legal, information security and data-governance leaders to define what may be collected, combined and activated. Commercial ambition cannot outrun privacy, cyber resilience or the obligations attached to retailer and distributor information.

First-year agenda

The first ninety days should produce a transparent map of journeys, capabilities, contracts, data flows, costs and operating pain. The assessment must start with decisions and customer work rather than with application inventories alone. It should show where orders fail, where representatives rekey information, where promotions cannot be evaluated, which integrations constrain change and which vendors hold economically important knowledge. The SVP will also establish a baseline for adoption, conversion, service contacts, order accuracy, release reliability and total run cost.

During the next phase, the executive will agree a channel-platform thesis with commercial, market and technology leadership. That thesis should distinguish common foundations—identity, catalogue, pricing interfaces, order orchestration, content, analytics and observability—from experiences that must remain specific to a customer segment. It will include build, buy and partner principles, an integration strategy for intermediaries and a funded sequence for retiring redundant services.

Two or three lighthouse journeys should move into production within the first year. Possible candidates include a distributor replenishment flow with dependable inventory signals, a food-service ordering journey designed around menu and pack economics, or a field-sales workspace that joins outlet opportunity with fulfilment reality. The choice will follow evidence gathered after appointment. Each release must be narrow enough to measure yet architected so that validated components can be reused.

The SVP must also stabilise delivery. Product teams need clear outcome ownership, engineering standards, secure release practices and service-level responsibilities that persist after launch. Vendor statements of work will be recast around capability transfer and measurable service, while scarce internal roles are strengthened through hiring and development. By month twelve, leadership should know which platforms will grow, migrate, coexist for a defined period or close—and the affected markets should understand the sequence.

Leadership responsibilities

The executive will chair portfolio choices across commercial and technology stakeholders, exposing dependencies and stopping initiatives that cannot demonstrate a valuable customer or operational outcome. They will translate channel strategy into product roadmaps, protect teams from unplanned executive demand and ensure learning from one market is available to others without being imposed uncritically.

Commercial adoption sits inside the role's accountability. The SVP will partner with sales leaders on processes, incentives, training and support where technology changes daily work. A portal used only because customers are forced onto it is not success; neither is an application that leaves representatives maintaining shadow spreadsheets.

The role owns the resilience and economic discipline of its platforms. Architecture decisions will account for peak ordering periods, offline or low-connectivity conditions, cyber threats, regulatory retention, payment exposure and the operational consequences of partner outages. Product investment cases must disclose implementation, integration, change and retirement costs. Benefits will be jointly signed by the commercial or operational leader expected to realise them.

Measures of success

The executive committee will review adoption by intended user group, digitally assisted order value, order completeness, integration latency, release frequency, critical incidents, customer-effort indicators and cost to serve. Commercial measures will include promotion visibility, reduction in manual reconciliation and improved availability where platform decisions materially influence it. No single gross merchandise value number will be treated as proof of customer value.

Progress in simplification will be measured through retired applications, eliminated interfaces, reduced vendor concentration and the proportion of strategic journeys running on supported components. Delivery predictability, internal product capability and time from a market need to a safe reusable release will provide evidence that the organisation—not just the software—has changed.

Candidate profile

The board is seeking an executive with 22–28 years of experience across digital product, enterprise platforms and customer-facing transformation. They may come from food and beverage, consumer goods, distribution, retail technology or another high-frequency, multi-channel environment. What matters is direct accountability for products used by external customers and front-line commercial teams across countries, not a career confined to internal systems implementation.

Candidates must show how they made channel-specific choices inside a reusable architecture. They should have managed material engineering and partner capacity, integrated acquired or local platforms, and retired services after moving users safely. Strong evidence will connect adoption and customer behaviour to margin, service or working-capital outcomes rather than reporting delivery milestones alone.

The SVP must be commercially credible, technically literate and prepared to decide with imperfect information. They should challenge both a sales leader who treats customisation as free and an architect who values elegance above usability.

Compensation and appointment terms

The anticipated base range is AED 1,600,000–2,200,000, with an annual performance award and long-term participation linked to enduring commercial and platform outcomes. Placement will consider the successful candidate's scope, mobility and current package. Relocation support and any responsible treatment of forfeited incentives will be determined during final negotiations.

Confidentiality

Client identity is withheld during the initial assessment because the appointment intersects with sensitive customer negotiations, platform contracts and succession planning. Further information will be released in stages after conflict and confidentiality review. Applicants should frame examples without naming customers, exposing partner data or sharing protected platform vulnerabilities.