Nestlé
Head of Innovation & Range
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Who are we?
Hi, we’re Tails.com – we turn good days into great years for dogs and their humans.
We're working towards longer lives for millions of healthy, happy dogs by providing tailored nutrition that adapts to each dog’s unique needs. It all starts with a few simple questions about their age, breed, zoomie level and tastebuds. From there, owners can create a personalised meal plan that's delivered to their door every month. No guesswork, no overwhelm. Just exactly the right care for every dog, every day. It's pretty clever stuff.
As a certified B Corp, being a responsible business is built into how we work – upholding high social and environmental standards to create better walkies for generations to come.
Now, we’re cooking up big plans. Having created an entirely new category in dog food, we have the backing of Purina – one of the world’s largest pet food companies. You’ll join a bunch of smart people working towards these same goals (and a bunch of very smart office dogs, all working on their own thing).
Job Title
Head of Innovation & Range
Reporting of the role
This role reports to the Brand & Innovation Director
Overview Of The Job
The food we make is one of the most important ways customers experience Tails. Every recipe, treat and supplement we create has the power to strengthen our relationship with customers, improve the lives of dogs and set us apart in an increasingly competitive category.
As Head of Innovation & Range, you’ll shape where our range goes next. You’ll define our long-term innovation strategy, lead the development of new products and continuously improve the products our customers already love. Partnering across Brand, Marketing, Digital Product, Proposition, Trading, Finance and Operations and our key supplier partners you’ll turn customer insight into meaningful innovation that delivers commercial growth while keeping Tails at the forefront of personalised meal plans including our 100% tailored kibble blends.
This isn’t a traditional Head of NPD role. It’s an opportunity to shape the future of one of the UK’s most distinctive D2C consumer brands, creating products that improve the lives of dogs while helping more customers discover why tailored nutrition matters.
3 Best Things About The Job
Shape one of the world’s most tailored food ranges:
- Every dog is different: You’ll help decide what we create next, how our range evolves and how we continue delivering genuinely tailored nutrition for all dogs at scale.
- You’ll have real influence: From long-term innovation strategy to the products customers receive every month, you’ll work across the business to shape decisions that matter for our customers and their dogs, our brand and our commercial performance.
Build what’s next:
- The foundations are in place. This is an opportunity to lead the next chapter of innovation at Tails, strengthening our capability, developing an exciting pipeline and building products that keep us ahead in a fast-moving category.
Measures of success – In the first few months, you would have:
- Built strong relationships across Brand, Marketing, Digital Product, Proposition, Trading, Finance and Operations and our key supplier partners, plus corporate stakeholders.
- Taken a fresh look at our current range strategy and 12–24 month pipeline, identifying opportunities to strengthen both renovation and innovation.
- Become confident in our product development process, including our stage gate and claims (IRAQ) framework.
- Developed a clear point of view on where our innovation efforts should focus over the next three to five years.
- Started evolving the capability of the team, ensuring we have the skills, structure and ways of working needed to deliver our ambitions.
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Roles & Responsibilities:
Innovation Strategy
- Develop and own the long-term strategy for the Tails range, identifying where we should innovate, where we should renovate and where we should simplify. Use customer insight, nutritional science, commercial understanding and market trends to build a balanced innovation pipeline that strengthens our proposition and supports sustainable growth.
- Always be looking ahead - understanding changing customer needs, emerging ingredients and new technologies, then translating those insights into products customers genuinely value.
Portfolio & Range Development
- Own the ongoing health of the Tails range, ensuring every product continues to earn its place. Use customer feedback, commercial performance, nutritional science and operational insight to identify where products should be improved, simplified, expanded or retired.
- Lead our renovation programme with the same ambition we bring to innovation, continually improving recipes, formats and customer experience so the range remains relevant, differentiated and commercially strong.
Innovation Delivery
- Own our innovation pipeline from first insight through to launch and beyond.
- Prioritise opportunities, guide cross-functional teams and make thoughtful trade-offs that balance customer benefit, technical feasibility, operational complexity and commercial return.
- Continuously improve how we develop products, ensuring our processes help teams move efficiently while maintaining the high standards our customers expect.
Commercial Performance
- Partner closely with our Commercial teams to understand how our range is performing and where the greatest opportunities lie.
- Use customer feedback, commercial data and post-launch learning to improve existing products, refine future innovation and build compelling business cases for investment.
- Take shared accountability for the long-term health of the range, balancing customer value with commercial performance
Leadership & Capability
- Lead, coach and develop a high-performing innovation team that combines curiosity, commercial thinking and technical expertise.
- Create an environment where people feel empowered to challenge assumptions, learn quickly and continually raise the standard of our products.
- Continue evolving how we work with supplier partners, ensuring strong relationships, clear accountability and a shared ambition to deliver outstanding products for our customers.
What you will need:
- Significant experience leading innovation, range strategy or product development within FMCG, food, nutrition or another consumer products business.
- A track record of building products and innovation pipelines that have delivered meaningful customer value and commercial growth.
- Experience managing an established product portfolio, balancing long-term innovation with continuous improvement of existing products.
- Strong strategic thinking, with the ability to move comfortably between long term vision and day-to-day delivery.
- A deep understanding of how customer insight, commercial performance and technical capability come together to create successful products.
- Ideally you have experience working in a business where nutritional, health or regulated claims are important.
- Excellent commercial judgement, with experience building business cases, prioritising investment and managing product performance.
- Experience leading and developing high-performing teams.
- The ability to influence confidently across technical, commercial and creative disciplines.
- Comfortable working at pace, making informed decisions with imperfect information and adapting as you learn.
- An understanding of how a physical product can form part of a broader proposition, with digital and service elements too.
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Nice to have:
- Experience within pet nutrition.
- Experience in a D2C, subscription or e-commerce business.
- Experience working with highly personalised products or services.
A few of our core benefits include:
- Private Healthcare through AXA
- A 9 day fortnight - our office is closed every other Friday!
- 25 days of Annual Leave and 8 additional remote working days
For more information on our benefits, perks and what makes us unique, please visit our website here
What’s next?
If this sounds like it matches your experience and what you’d love to do, we can’t wait to hear from you! If you’re unsure whether you fit our criteria exactly, please get in touch anyway. And because we believe that diverse teams perform better, we’d especially love to hear from you if you’re from an under-represented demographic.
Here’s a taster of how our recruitment process works:
- Once you have applied your CV will be reviewed by the Talent Acquisition Team.
- If selected, you will then have a call with the TA Team who will tell you more about us and the role, as well as learning more about your skills and experience.
- Should you be successful, the next stage will be a video call with the hiring manager.
- If successful, you will be invited to present a task back to a panel of interviewers.
- The final stage will be a more informal conversation with some of your peers.
Our Commitment
We’re proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are under-represented at Tails.com.
During your interview process you’ll meet some of our team with varying levels of responsibility and experience. We want to give every candidate a fair interview process and if you need any reasonable adjustments made, please let us know.
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