Senior SAP Product Owner

Job Overview:

The SAP Product Owner is a senior leadership role accountable for setting the strategic direction, governance, delivery priorities and operational performance of the SAP product landscape across FICO, OTC, Retail and SCM. The role owns the SAP product vision and roadmap, ensuring that SAP capabilities enable business strategy, simplify operations, improve resilience and deliver measurable value across the enterprise.

This role provides senior leadership to the SAP functional leads for FICO, OTC, Retail and SCM, setting clear strategic priorities, governance standards, delivery expectations and cross-domain design principles. It is accountable for ensuring that functional roadmaps, solution decisions and support priorities are aligned, controlled and commercially focused.

The role owns the relationship and performance governance for the outsourced third-party SAP support supplier responsible for end-to-end SAP support, including Basis activities, incident and service request management, problem management, operational stability and the delivery of small changes. It also manages the relationship with the third-party SAP software maintenance supplier, ensuring appropriate advice, support and assurance are in place to address SAP security risks and emerging threats.

The successful candidate will operate confidently with senior business stakeholders, IT leadership, functional specialists, architects and external partners to drive strategic outcomes, manage risk and continuously improve SAP service performance.

Key Accountabilities

• Define and own the strategic SAP product vision, roadmap and delivery priorities across FICO, OTC, Retail and SCM, ensuring alignment with enterprise strategy, business transformation goals and technology standards.
• Provide senior leadership to SAP functional leads across FICO, OTC, Retail and SCM, ensuring strong domain ownership, clear accountability, consistent design standards and effective cross-functional decision-making.
• Chair or contribute to senior governance forums for SAP demand, prioritisation, risk, service performance and change delivery, ensuring scarce capacity is focused on the highest-value business outcomes.
• Own executive-level supplier governance for the outsourced third-party SAP support partner, including performance management, service improvement, commercial alignment, escalation routes and delivery accountability.
• Ensure the support supplier delivers robust end-to-end SAP support services, including incident management, service requests, problem management, Basis support, operational stability and agreed small support changes.
• Act as the senior accountable escalation point for material SAP product, service, supplier, risk and cross-functional delivery issues.
• Ensure SAP solution design, support activity and small changes are secure, compliant, integrated, controlled, scalable and aligned with enterprise architecture, audit and operational governance standards.
• Influence senior business stakeholders, IT leadership, governance groups and external partners to secure alignment on SAP priorities, trade-offs, risks, capacity and delivery outcomes.
• Drive continuous improvement, simplification, standardisation and service maturity across SAP processes, supplier delivery, product governance and support ways of working.

Leadership Behaviours

• Provides strategic direction, constructive challenge and confident decision-making across business, technology and supplier communities.
• Creates clear accountability through functional leads while empowering teams to own outcomes within agreed governance and design principles.
• Builds senior stakeholder trust by balancing strategic ambition, operational resilience, commercial discipline and delivery pragmatism.
• Demonstrates enterprise leadership, strong judgement, commercial awareness and a sustained focus on long-term business value.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in senior SAP product ownership, SAP service leadership, ERP platform ownership or SAP delivery leadership within a complex enterprise environment.
• Strong breadth of SAP functional knowledge across FICO, OTC, Retail and SCM, with the senior judgement required to lead functional specialists, challenge recommendations and make priority decisions at enterprise level.
• Proven experience leading and managing SAP functional leads or senior SAP specialists, creating clear accountability, strong delivery discipline and effective cross-domain decision-making.
• Proven track record of managing outsourced SAP support suppliers at a senior level, including service governance, commercial performance, escalation management, continuous improvement and small change delivery.
• Strong understanding of SAP support operating models, Basis support, incident and problem management, release governance, controls, audit requirements and operational service resilience.
• Good understanding of SAP software maintenance, patching, security risk management and supplier assurance in a controlled enterprise environment.
• Highly capable senior stakeholder manager with the ability to influence priorities, resolve competing demands, communicate trade-offs and represent SAP product and service performance at leadership forums.
• Commercially aware, outcome-focused and able to translate business strategy into a clear SAP roadmap, governance model and supplier delivery expectations.