Dunelm
Self-Service Analytics Centre of Excellence Manager
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This hybrid role can be based out of Leicester or London office.
Home. There's no place like it.
And there's no feeling like helping people create the joy of feeling truly at home. At Dunelm, that's what we do. We're the UK's number one choice for homewares because we make home life lovelier for our customers. And we've crafted a workplace that feels just as welcoming, where you can bring your ideas, be yourself, and feel right at home.
Work your way, together
We're a hybrid business, which means you'll have flexibility alongside time together with your team. In this role, you can expect 2 days per week in our Leicester or London office, helping you stay connected, collaborate and do your best work for our customers.
The Data and Analytics department
The department comprises of 5 interconnected capabilities:
- Future fit data platform – the enterprise data platform delivered by our core data engineering teams, providing a trusted, single version of business truth to drive value through data and decision intelligence.
- Self-Service Analytics Centre of Excellence – the core team responsible for driving governed self-service analytics adoption across our organisation. The team maintains, enhances and develops our ThoughtSpot-led, AI-enabled analytics ecosystem, provides advice, guidance and support to our business community, and maintains a suite of centrally managed enterprise analytics products.
- ABODE (Advanced Business Optimisation Engine) – A suite of interconnected Analytics and AI models powering high velocity, complex decisions across our organisation.
- Optimisation Centre of Excellence – The core team responsible for supporting high value investment decisions across our organisation through bespoke, specialised analytics.
- Customer Insights – A dedicated team of customer focused analysts, helping to drive customer obsessed decisioning through improved customer insight.
The role
The Self-Service Analytics Centre of Excellence Manager leads the capability responsible for enabling governed, scalable and trusted self-service analytics across Dunelm. Reporting to the Director of Data Engineering, the role owns the standards, adoption approach and capability development for self-service analytics across current and future tools, including ThoughtSpot, ensuring colleagues can confidently answer business questions and use insight to drive better decisions using high-quality data products, clear definitions and intuitive analytics experiences.
The role combines leadership, analytics product ownership, platform stewardship, stakeholder engagement, coaching and data literacy enablement. It is accountable for setting the operating model and governance approach for self-service analytics, while ensuring centrally managed BI products and self-service capabilities remain reliable, supportable and aligned to business priorities.
A key part of the role is to coach and mentor business colleagues so they can use self-service analytics confidently and effectively to answer business questions and drive better decisions. This includes helping colleagues frame the right business questions, interpret results, apply data storytelling, use test and learn approaches, and turn insight into clear actions. The role will also provide functional guidance and subject matter expertise to dedicated business partner analysts drawn from the Analytics teams where deeper analytical support is required.
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Self-Service Analytics Strategy and Adoption
- Define and lead the strategy for governed self-service analytics adoption across Dunelm, covering ThoughtSpot and other current or future analytics capabilities.
- Create clear pathways for colleagues to self-serve, supported by training, coaching, guidance, office hours, standards and reusable examples.
- Drive measurable improvements in analytics adoption, user confidence, data literacy and reduction of repeat manual reporting demand.
Leadership, Coaching and Business Enablement
- Lead, coach and develop the Self-Service Analytics Centre of Excellence team, creating a high-performing, collaborative and business-focused capability.
- Coach and mentor business colleagues in how to frame business questions, interpret data, tell clear data stories, test and learn through data, and turn insight into decisions and action.
- Provide functional guidance and subject matter expertise to dedicated business partner analysts from the Analytics teams, helping ensure specialist analytical support is consistent, high quality and aligned to self-service analytics standards.
- Build a culture of quality, curiosity, ownership, continuous improvement and trusted partnership with business, Product, Delivery, Data Engineering, Data Management and Analytics colleagues.
Analytics Product and Platform Stewardship
- Own the standards and lifecycle for self-service analytics assets, including semantic models, dashboards, reports, ThoughtSpot Answers and Liveboards, and centrally managed BI products.
- Ensure analytics products and tools are trusted, intuitive, performant, documented and aligned to agreed business definitions and governance controls.
- Partner with Data Engineering and Data Management to improve semantic model quality, metadata, lineage, certification and reusable metric definitions across self-service analytics capabilities.
Stakeholder Engagement and Governance
- Act as the senior point of contact for self-service analytics, helping business teams understand how to use analytics safely, effectively and consistently.
- Work with Product, Delivery and Analytics colleagues to shape demand, prioritise high-value opportunities and determine the right balance between self-service enablement, centrally delivered BI outcomes and specialist analysis.
- Champion governed analytics by embedding clear standards for access, certification, documentation, quality, supportability and responsible use.
What we'll look for in you
Essential skills and experience
- Strong leadership capability, with experience managing, coaching and developing analysts, BI specialists or data professionals.
- Experience coaching, mentoring and enabling business colleagues to use analytics confidently, frame questions effectively, interpret results and turn insight into better decisions.
- Experience leading BI, analytics enablement or self-service analytics capabilities in a complex organisation.
- Strong understanding of governed self-service analytics across multiple tools and capabilities, including adoption, enablement, standards, training and support models.
- Experience with ThoughtSpot or comparable self-service BI platforms, with the ability to set direction and standards for semantic models, dashboards, reports or equivalent analytics assets.
- Strong understanding of analysis methods, data storytelling, test and learn approaches, interpretation of results and how analytics can be used to answer business questions and drive better decisions.
- Strong understanding of semantic models, dimensional modelling, reusable metrics, metadata and governed business definitions.
- Ability to translate business priorities into analytics roadmaps, delivery plans and clear team priorities.
- Excellent stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders and explain complex data concepts clearly to non-technical colleagues.
- Strong governance mindset, including awareness of access control, certified content, documentation, data quality and supportability standards.
- Commercial awareness and ability to focus analytics capability on measurable business value, adoption, decision improvement and action.
- Ability to create a collaborative, inclusive and high-performing team culture.
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Desirable skills
- Hands-on experience administering, developing or optimising ThoughtSpot content, including semantic models, Answers, Liveboards, permissions and certified content.
- Experience working across multiple analytics and BI tools, with the ability to determine which capability is most appropriate for different business needs.
- Experience working with Snowflake or another cloud data platform, including awareness of performance, cost and platform consumption considerations.
- Experience leading BI migration, simplification or rationalisation activity, particularly where moving from traditional reporting to governed self-service analytics.
- Experience establishing communities of practice, coaching frameworks or shared standards that help business colleagues build confidence and capability in using analytics.
- Exposure to AI-assisted analytics, natural language BI or metadata-driven analytics experiences.
- Retail analytics experience or experience supporting analytics adoption in a large, multi-functional organisation.
Key qualities, behaviours and values
- Stronger Together – connecting and team working.
- Keep Listening and Learning – being curious and adapting.
- Thinking Long Term – customer-first mindset and thinking big.
- Acts Like an Owner – taking responsibility and delivering results.
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