Digital Portfolio Lead (18 Month Fixed- Term Contract) in Reading

Because your new ideas are our way new ways of working. Evolve, your way.

Digital at Primark

Our digital teams are right at the heart of what we do. Surrounded by some of the best digital specialists in the industry, you’ll bring your own ideas to the business to shape the experience of our customers as part of a forward-thinking team.

A large-scale Digital Transformation is underway, and we are recruiting a Digital Portfolio Lead to oversee the full portfolio, ensuring overall health, performance, and alignment with strategic priorities while operating alongside executive stakeholders. This senior role is responsible for shaping, governing, and driving execution across multiple business domains, ensuring investments deliver measurable outcomes and support the evolution of operating models, customer experience, and organisational capability.

The role requires strong portfolio expertise, commercial acumen, strategic thinking, and the ability to influence across senior leadership and cross-functional teams. Additionally, it enables effective execution, governance, and financial management by ensuring initiatives are delivered on time and budget, coordinating delivery, managing risks and resources, and partnering with Technology, Supply Chain, and key functions to optimise outcomes.

What You’ll Do as a Digital Portfolio Lead

• Lead the end-to-end digital transformation portfolio, translating corporate strategy into a coherent roadmap aligned to business outcomes, operating model priorities, and strategic value, risk, and capacity considerations.
• Shape and prioritise the portfolio to ensure investments deliver measurable commercial and operational value while supporting organisational capability, customer experience, and transformation goals.
• Establish and lead robust portfolio governance, decision forums, reporting structures, and PMO standards to ensure execution discipline across all digital initiatives.
• Oversee financial management including budgets, forecasts, vendor spend, cost control, and transformation investment cases, ensuring optimisation of spend and value realisation.
• Drive transparency across delivery, including risks, dependencies, decisions, benefits, KPIs, and performance against agreed outcomes and investment cases.
• Provide clear, concise executive reporting on portfolio health, while identifying risks early and constructively challenging to drive corrective action and improved outcomes.
• Partner with executives, functional and senior business leaders to align priorities, enable decision-making, and act as a trusted advisor on sequencing, investment trade-offs, and organisational impact.
• Influence effectively across business, technology, supply chain, operations, finance, and people functions to ensure cohesion and delivery success.
• Coordinate complex cross-functional delivery across programmes, product teams, and business units, managing interdependencies across technology, processes, people, and operations.
• Ensure transformation initiatives are embedded into business planning and operational cycles, with strong integration across all functions.
• Support evolution of the operating model, organisational structures, and ways of working, ensuring strong change management, adoption, capability building, and consistency in methodologies and standards.
• Operate as an enterprise transformation leader by driving alignment, accountability, pace, and clarity; building credibility; leading and developing high-performing teams through coaching, while maintaining a strong professional reputation internally and externally.

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ years leading large-scale transformation portfolios in enterprise environments, with experience across global retail, consumer, FMCG, logistics, or similarly customer-centric sectors, managing multiple concurrent initiatives with enterprise-wide impact.
• Deep expertise in digital operating models, transformation governance, organisational change, and enterprise-scale agile methodologies and frameworks.
• Strong executive presence with proven ability to engage, influence, and confidently challenge senior leadership and C-suite stakeholders.
• Experience leading large, matrixed teams and squads across both business and technology functions, driving delivery and alignment across complex organisational structures.
• Strong commercial and financial acumen, including investment governance, benefits management, and the ability to challenge assumptions and drive disciplined decision-making.
• Highly organisationally savvy with strong communication skills, able to navigate complex political environments, lead through ambiguity with confidence, drive action with appropriate governance, and ideally bring exposure to omnichannel transformation, customer platforms, or enterprise modernisation.

Does this sound like you? Great, because we can’t wait to see what you’ll bring. You’ll be supported within a team of equally capable people, celebrating who you are and aiding you reach your potential. At Primark, we’re excited about our future - and we’re excited to develop yours.

What You’ll Get

People are at the heart of what we do here, so it’s essential we provide you with the right environment to perform at your very best. Let’s talk lifestyle: You will also get 27 days of annual leave and bank holidays and you can also buy 5 more. Because Primark is all about tailoring to you we offer tax saver ticket, fitness centre and a subsidised cafeteria.

About Primark

At Primark, people matter. They’re the beating heart of our business and the reason we’ve grown from our first store in Dublin in 1969 to a £9bn+ turnover business and over 80,000 colleagues and over 440 stores in 17 countries today. Our values run through everything we do. In essence, we're Caring and always strive to put people first. We're also Dynamic, bravely pushing the boundaries to stay ahead. And finally, we succeed Together.