Job Description

Permanent
From 90,000 + Pension + BUPA + ShareSave + 6.6 weeks holiday + Hybrid Working
Southampton, Store Support Office
We believe anyone can improve their home to make life better. From our Southampton Store Support office (SSO) we equip our stores, our people, and our whole business with everything it takes to help our millions of customers create a home they'll love. Join us as a Head of Data Visualisation & Automation and you'll be a big part of this.
Role Purpose: The Head of Data Visualisation & Automation will join the B&Q Data Leadership team. You'll oversee the design, development and delivery of B&Q's enterprise dashboards, workflow automations and visual data product enablement across the wider business. Your remit includes how the business uses these products; establishing consistent design standards, building robust and scalable data models and driving adoption. This isn't just reporting & BI; it's a highly visible leadership role, responsible for unifying reporting and raising standards across functions, and building the capability and culture that make B&Q a genuinely data-driven business.
What's the job?

• Lead the Data Visualisation & Automation team, ensuring capability for now and the future. Grow the team through coaching, training and recruitment, and develop a culture of learning, empowerment, experimentation and collaboration.
• Lead and deliver the product development strategy for dashboards, reports and data apps across B&Q, setting standards for design, storytelling and self-serve analytics. Built on the Power Platform and aligned to group Tech governance and architecture.
• Work in partnership as part of the Data Leadership team at B&Q, with peers in Analytics, Data Science, Insight and Data Strategy & Governance, to deliver integrated, first-class data solutions that support consistent decision-making across B&Q.
• Own the vision and roadmap for a new B&Q Insight Platform, ensuring it becomes the business-wide destination for insight, planning and decision support. Within it, develop interactive dashboards, data applications and tools that address core business challenges such as range optimisation, pricing, performance tracking and operational efficiency, working in collaboration with Analytics and Data Science.
• Ensure DVA products are intuitive, accessible and scalable, supporting widespread adoption across the business. Either transform or remove all legacy reporting.
• Engage senior stakeholders to understand strategic priorities and, where relevant, translate these into data product requirements, prioritising value.
• Play an active role with peers in Analytics & Data Science and Insight to set up and drive the success of the overall Data & AI demand process & forums across B&Q, removing all historic processes and forums.
• Develop a backlog of work and use agile management practices to prioritise effectively across DVA needs, ensuring the team delivers high-value outcomes at pace.
• Define and maintain the data requirements roadmap for DVA, working with Data Delivery to realise this, ensuring robust models, flows and automation from source systems to business-ready outputs. Ensure your team use only assured and controlled data assets within a governed and managed environment.
• Bridge the gap between Databricks and Power BI, defining the right data flow, models and automation that connect gold-layer foundations to practical business tools.
• Lead automation initiatives using the Power Platform and cloud tools (Databricks, dbt) to reduce manual effort and support repeatable, high-quality insight and other data products (e.g. TP Connect, retail equipment checking tools, in-store visitor management).
• Set and uphold design, modelling and engineering standards across all BI products, covering storytelling, user experience, data quality, security, naming conventions, documentation, CI/CD and version control.
• Ensure insight products are accurate, auditable and maintainable, with clear ownership and lifecycle management.
• Champion safe, governed self-serve adoption, enabling colleagues to access trusted and actionable data in their day-to-day roles.
• Establish kitemarked data definitions, methodologies and governance, promoting a single source of truth for the organisation.
• Promote responsible data and AI usage, aligned to policies and best practice set out by B&Q Data Governance. Stay current with developments in BI, automation, AI and retail data, bringing external thinking to evolve B&Q's DVA capability.
• Represent B&Q in group forums about DVA, sharing best practice, influencing investment and ensuring alignment across banners.
• Challenge the organisation to realise the art of the possible and maximise value from its data assets.

What we need:

• You have proven experience leading data visualisation or BI functions within a business that serves customers, ideally large retail or telecommunications.
• You have an extensive technical background yourself. You're an expert in SQL, and you have strong knowledge of Databricks and Python, and experience designing scalable data products and workflows.
• You also have deep technical expertise in reporting suites, especially Power BI; including data modelling, DAX, performance optimisation and user adoption.
• You're an experienced user of cloud data platforms (Azure, GCP or AWS).
• You have built automation and workflow solutions using Power Automate, Power Apps or similar tools.
• You have experience establishing design and engineering standards for reporting/BI products (governance, CI/CD, version control, testing).
• You care about Quality Assurance, and lead coding documentation and version control best practices using GitHub. You grasp the importance of Data Governance and good Data Quality.
• You have a varied background in analyses & reporting across Customer, Digital/Web, Commercial, Marketing and Retail use cases, and you can advise on methodologies, data strategies and best practises.
• You know the basics of and want to explore new realms of AI capability on top of traditional visualisation.
• You've managed and built teams of experts and managers, leading matrix teams of analysts, developers and data engineers to become a high-performing function.

What's in it for me?
As part of a great team, you'll be valued for who you are. We're committed to making B&Q more diverse and representative of the communities we serve, where everyone can feel they belong and have equal opportunities. You will have access to a range of networks that represent our colleagues and allies and help us to continue to put diversity and inclusion at the heart of our business.
We also recognise that wellness means different things to different people, and we want to help colleagues be at their best and feel well by offering a range of benefits to help you. As well as a competitive salary, our benefits package includes an award-winning pension scheme, bonus, ShareSave options, 6.6 weeks holiday, payroll giving, an Employee Assistance Programme, shopping discounts, colleague wellbeing benefits and lots more!
So we can support you during the application or interview process, please contact recruitment@b-and-q.co.uk for any recruitment adjustments.

Skills Required