Rising Star: How to make it in the highly competitive world of retail (and get spotted as a top talent by being curious, proactive and gutsy)

Rose Young, Portfolio Delivery Manager at No7 Beauty Company, is APM’s Young Project Professional of the Year. Charles Orton-Jones discovers how her front-foot management style helped her win.

Ambitious project professionals are always on the lookout for ways to improve. And what better way to learn than by following the advice of APM’s Young Project Professional of the Year?

Every year, APM receives a raft of extraordinary applications. It takes something special to top the charts. The 2022 winner was Rose Young.

Originally from Cambridgeshire, Young is too modest to sing her own praises, but during the course of our interview, big lessons don’t so much emerge as leap out.

The backdrop is the No7 Beauty Company, owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance and one of the nation’s most popular cosmetics brands. Young got a taste for project management during a university placement there, and on graduation in 2019 she joined full time. She’d landed her first project manager job with the Soap & Glory sub‑brand in January 2020 with a brief to help launch a new skincare product, when reports of a significant virus from China hit the press. We all know what happened next.

It pays to be nosy

“It was a challenge,” she recalls. The opportunity to meet senior staff was gone. The chance to grab colleagues for advice, stolen. Her response? “I got on the front foot. I would put a meeting in anyone’s diary whom I wanted to get to know. I’d talk to them and try to find out about them as a person and not just about work stuff, as that’s what you miss in an office when you sit next to someone.” She made a list of all the departments and roles she wanted to understand and simply booked in video calls with anyone and everyone she regarded as a useful contact. Then she moved onto the company leadership.

“I scheduled some time for an introduction. I’d say: this is who I am. This is my job. This is my name, my email and what I’m going to deliver,” she explains. Even for a naturally charismatic and confident individual such as Young, this was a gutsy move. “Basically, I’m just really nosy,” she jokes – deflecting from the fact that this method should be in textbooks. As she stormed her way through the company contacts book, she began to see ways of improving operations. Again and again, she’d see opportunities and then set about implementing changes.

Taking on procurement

For example, a brand like No7 thrives or dies on Christmas trade. “We have gifts that do £1m a day before Christmas,” says Young. “We have to deliver on time. It’s a hard deadline.” There are 350 products in the full range, with 50 million unit components to order for the manufacturing process. The lead time is more than a year. “I noticed the way we were running things didn’t fit with the extended lead times COVID-19 brought about. I came in with fresh eyes and created a framework of what needed to happen when, stating the duties of each function. I aligned the framework with all the different functions across the entire gifting programme and got everyone’s buy‑in.” Her system fundamentally reorganised procurement.

She tweaked how orders are made. Instead of buying cosmetic ingredients and packaging in one go, she split orders into two 50% tranches. The second tranche is delayed until the company is clearer on sales volumes, lowering the risk of unsold inventory. The impact was a rock‑solid supply chain and superior cashflow. She compounded the benefits with a total rethink of procurement sign‑offs. “There was a massive to‑do with how many people it took to sign orders off,” she recalls. “We looked at it again. Is it really necessary to go through each person for approval? No, okay, let’s switch that. We also gave everyone the information they needed, so they tick‑box the order straight away.” Form filling fell 64%.

On the front foot

Her proactive style is extraordinary. How does she explain it? “I like to be on the front foot,” she says. “I’m really results driven. The more I learned about different functions, and the interdependence, I could see how things hadn’t quite linked up and how we could create efficiencies. When you show people your ideas, they think, ‘Well why weren’t we doing that before? Let’s do it.’” Time and again, she’s seen an inefficiency and bust a gut to fix it. When Young noticed a pinch‑point in the data completion process, she instigated twice‑weekly focus meetings with a sprint mindset to remedy the glitch, slashing four weeks off admin lead time.

She’s looking to automate SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) tracking to improve resource efficiency by 70%. When difficulties arise, the company looks to Young to head a Rapid Action Team (RAT) to bring multiple functions together to find solutions. “I just find out who I want in a RAT, call a meeting, talk through the risks, divvy up the tasks and tell people when they need to be done by.” She restructured the company stage gates to add more flexibility to lead times, and is even eliminating Letters of Interest (LoIs) in procurement: “We are trying to get rid of LoIs to move straight to a purchase order.”

Tenacity and enthusiasm

During the pandemic, she even took a lead role in improving morale, organising monthly video calls to share team successes and team news. Her boss, Charlotte Bowerman, Head of Gifts at No7, says, “Without Rose the programme’s success wouldn’t have been possible. She already has one eye on Holiday ’24 and beyond to ensure continuous growth and improvement.” Bowerman nominated Young for the 2022 APM Young Project Professional of the Year Award, where judges recognised her “tenacity and enthusiasm” in awarding her the top prize.

It’s worth adding that Young may be driven, but her cheerfulness and humour suggest she’s a lot of fun to work with. Her front‑foot style seems to be entirely achievable while remaining polite, calm and collegiate. Starting a career during the pandemic is a tough act. Doing so, thriving and becoming indispensable in a sizeable corporation within two years is a phenomenal achievement. The front‑foot management style is a career hack we could all learn from.

CV: Rose Young

Aug 2021–present Portfolio Delivery Manager

Nov 2020–Aug 2021 Project Manager, Gifting

Jan 2020–Oct 2020 Project Manager, Soap & Glory

November 2019 Joined No7 Beauty Company

Education: Nottingham Trent University, business management and enterprise (first class); Hills Road sixth form college, Cambridge

Rose’s top tips for project professionals

 1 Turn your camera on

When you join a meeting, make sure your camera is on. Being able to see the faces of participants is important. When you can see the face of someone you feel like you are talking to a real person and getting to know them. I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t do that. Why? I don’t know, maybe they are in their pyjamas!

2 End meetings with a summary

At the end of every meeting, make sure you summarise the actions and who is responsible, otherwise people will leave the meeting and forget what was said. Nothing will get done. Ask if anyone has any questions. Some participants can be shy, especially in online meetings. Be direct and ask each person if they have any questions.

3 Make a contingency plan

Plan A rarely happens. Always have a Plan B, C and D. And keep making contingency plans. Things will go wrong and keep going wrong, but as long as you have an idea of how to respond to each challenge, and you’ve discussed your plans with colleagues beforehand, you can switch straight away, as people are already signed up to it.

4 Break big tasks into smaller ones

Smaller tasks are easier to track as a project manager. This method also keeps the team motivated. If you talk about something four weeks in the distance, they’ll lack a sense of urgency around a job and put it off until the end, by which point it’s too late. If you truly understand a task you should be able to break it down into parts.

5 Ask lots of questions

As a project manager you can’t know everything about everything. Instead, gather information by talking to experts. Personally, I love to know the ‘why’ behind things. I want detail so I can understand the logic at work. When I grasp a concept then I’m better at serving my team. Be prepared to ask stupid questions.

6 Set out your goals before you start

Before embarking on any action make sure your goals are clear. This way you can track progress and stay on task. If you drift from your goals you’ll notice. I’ll have a big goal that we cannot waver from. We’ll have other goals too. They all go in a project action log at the top, so when you hold your project kick‑off meeting everyone is clear from the first minute, and the team can move in the same direction together.

7 Get comfortable with uncertainty

Unknowns will always rear their head. This is why I advocate preparing multiple plans. The other aspect is your emotional state. A project manager needs to be like a swan. Totally calm on the surface, with legs going absolutely crazy below the surface. When you are confident in your planning and knowledge of a project, then it’s easier to keep calm.
 

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2023 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.