Senior Strategy & Planning Associate, SSA Competition

About The Role

The MEA Strategy & Planning team works hand-in-hand with the operations team to deliver against our ambitious growth plans. The team is responsible for the region's most critical initiatives and runs cross-cutting programs.

Competition is one of our biggest challenges in the SSA region, and we’re looking for someone who can not only lead the strategy for the region but who also has the operational and collaboration skills to work with our operational teams to operationalise on our competitive response strategies. You will require a strategic outlook, strong partnering skills as well as a validated ability to work on complex projects across multiple functions and countries.

This is a meaningful role, as you will be in charge of identifying competitive moves that could impact our positioning in the market, as well as working on our response and overseeing execution, and scaling standard methodology across the region. Moreover, as part of the broader MEA S&P team, this role will be encouraged to partner with leadership on key strategic priorities and projects across SSA.

What You’ll Do

• Capture Intelligence - lead our regional competitive and business intelligence processes to ensure the accuracy of our data and track our competitors’ key moves in the region
• Generate Insights - use competitive intel & insights to help lay the foundation for and influence our strategy across the business (e.g. product, safety)
• Define Competition Strategy - in conjunction with teams regionally and globally, flesh out the SSA competition strategy, prioritize the key response areas and set measurable critical metrics for completing your goals
• Collaborate - coordinate with Policy, Business Development, Legal, Customer Experience, Marketing and other cross-functions as well as external teams to launch our competitive response and other key initiatives across SSA
• Manage performance - lay the foundations for handling the performance of initiatives and reporting performance to senior leadership to enable decision making
• Advocate - get strategic agreement for initiatives, as well as be the voice of the business to ensure continued alignment and prioritization with global teams

What You Need

• A minimum of 5 years experience in a strategy/operations/consulting/analytical role
• Experience working in the Sub Saharan Africa region
• Strong communication and collaboration skills - good at working with diverse teams and building solutions
• Strong project management skills experience with proven record of owning and leading initiatives and projects
• Analytical rigor - experience dealing with complex data sets, deriving insights and checking against what you see in the real-world
• Strategic approach - comfortable in the detail, but also able to see the bigger picture and pivot strategically
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to navigate in a matrix organisation