Role Purpose

This leadership role is accountable for supporting and constructively challenging the Franchise organisation to translate enterprise and OU commercial strategy into market-level, executable actions across Independent Bottlers.
The role acts as a strategic integrator across Franchise, Integrated Operations (IB), Bottlers, and OU Leadership, ensuring end-to-end alignment, disciplined execution, and continuous learning to drive sustainable growth.

What You’ll Do for Us

Strategic Integration & Execution

Partner closely with Integrated Operations (IB) teams to co-define, calibrate, and refine execution strategies based on market realities and bottler capabilities.
Work with Franchise leadership to lead system-wide end-to-end alignment with Independent Bottlers at the local and market level.
Act as a thought partner to Franchise Leads—alignment ownership remains with the Franchise Lead, while this role stewards rigor, clarity, and pace.

Insights-Led Commercial Strategy

Pull together data, analytics, and market insights to identify granular growth opportunities across channels, customers, and geographies.
Translate insights into clear, actionable commercial levers that can be executed at the bottler and frontline levels.
Use a fact-based, hypothesis-driven approach to challenge assumptions and sharpen local commercial strategies.

Strategic Project Leadership

Identify, frame, and conduct preliminary evaluation of strategic initiatives that support Franchise and system growth objectives.
Own and manage the Franchise strategic project portfolio, partnering with Franchise teams, IB, and OU functions to drive outcomes.
Ensure disciplined project governance—clear objectives, success metrics, timelines, and accountability.

Performance Measurement & Learning

Objectively assess successes and failures of strategic initiatives.
Capture learnings and systematically feed insights back into future strategies and projects, strengthening institutional capability over time.
Build mechanisms to network best practices, importing and exporting scalable ideas across markets and bottlers.

Enterprise Contribution

Partner with the OU Leadership Team (OULT) on business-critical, enterprise-level initiatives, bringing a system lens and execution rigor.

Work Focus / Leadership Expectations

Mastery in developing compelling, actionable consumer and commercial insights at market level.
Ability to convert strategy into clear execution roadmaps with measurable commercial impact.
Strong capability to manage ambiguity, complexity, and multiple senior stakeholders across the KO System.
Demonstrated ability to influence without authority, particularly in bottler-facing environments.
Role-model “Leadership in the Network”—collaborative, inclusive, enterprise-first mindset.

Qualifications & Experience

8+ years of progressive experience in Operations, Commercial Strategy, Franchise, or related business roles.
Proven leadership track record, including leading teams and influencing senior leadership forums.
Experience working in complex, matrixed, and culturally diverse environments.
Strong analytical orientation combined with practical, execution-focused thinking.

Communication & Stakeholder Management

Extensive engagement with senior leaders across the KO System, including high-stakes discussions and negotiations with bottlers.
Exceptional storytelling, presentation, and influencing skills—able to align diverse stakeholders around shared outcomes.
Demonstrated ability to tailor messaging to different audiences, balancing strategic depth with operational clarity.
Comfortable navigating sensitive, high-context situations with maturity and commercial acumen.

Skills:

Our Purpose and Growth Culture:

We are taking deliberate action to nurture an inclusive culture that is grounded in our company purpose, to refresh the world and make a difference. We act with a growth mindset, take an expansive approach to what’s possible and believe in continuous learning to improve our business and ourselves. We focus on four key behaviors – curious, empowered, inclusive and agile – and value how we work as much as what we achieve. We believe that our culture is one of the reasons our company continues to thrive after 130+ years. Visit Our Purpose and Vision to learn more about these behaviors and how you can bring them to life in your next role at Coca-Cola.

Director Franchise Strategy, Independent Bottlers

Key skills

About this role