Senior Activity Planning Manager

The Senior Activity Planning Manager is the operational backbone of the Commercial Marketing team. This role owns the end-to-end planning, coordination and supported execution of all commercial campaigns and activation activities across every client site. At current scale — 55 sites — the role demands exceptional organisation and cross-functional discipline. At 5 million homes, it will demand system-level thinking, AI-augmented workflows and a leadership posture that scales people, processes and technology simultaneously.

Campaign & Activity Planning

• Own the master commercial activity calendar across all 55+ sites, managing simultaneous campaigns, promotions, launches and activations.
• Translate commercial strategy and quarterly priorities into detailed, site-level execution plans with clear owners, timelines and success metrics.
• Lead integrated briefing sessions with Brand, Media team, Field Ops and Head of Distribution to align creative, logistics and resourcing before each campaign cycle.
• Anticipate planning conflicts, resource gaps and market-readiness issues at least 4–6 weeks ahead of activation — and resolve them proactively.
• Build and maintain a rolling 13-week activity planning horizon that scales to 200+ sites by 2030.

Cross-functional Coordination & Stakeholder Management

• Serve as the single point of coordination between Commercial Leads, Brand, Field Operations, Training, Finance and external agencies/suppliers.
• Run structured campaign kick-offs, weekly traffic meetings and cross-hub syncs that keep all teams aligned and accountable.
• Manage agency and supplier relationships to ensure OTIF (on time, in full) delivery of all campaign collateral, activation materials and training assets.
• Build trust with Field Operations teams by understanding township-market realities and translating them back into planning assumptions.
• Escalate commercial risks and delivery blockers with recommended solutions — not just flags.

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Project Management, Systems & AI-Augmented Execution

• Own the project management ecosystem: build, configure and continuously improve workspaces in Monday.com (or equivalent enterprise-grade PM tools) to provide real-time visibility of all live campaigns.
• Use AI tools daily — for drafting briefs, summarising stakeholder feedback, generating campaign reporting, flagging scheduling conflicts and producing templates at scale.
• Design and implement scalable SOPs and workflow frameworks that can be rolled out to new sites without reliance on individual tribal knowledge.
• Build automated reporting dashboards that surface campaign status, delivery metrics and capacity utilisation to the CCO and Commercial Leads in near real time.
• Lead the evaluation, onboarding and optimisation of any new planning or marketing operations technology.

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Resource & Capacity Management

• Maintain a live, accurate view of team capacity, project loads and competing priorities across all active workstreams.
• Manage freelancer, agency and internal resource allocation to ensure optimal utilisation without burnout.
• Flag capacity risks 3–4 weeks ahead and propose re-prioritisation or resourcing solutions to the CCO.
• Contribute to headcount planning as the team scales — identifying which functions require dedicated support at specific growth thresholds.

Budget, Performance Tracking & Continuous Improvement

• Track campaign delivery against approved budgets; flag variances and scope-change cost implications in real time.
• Produce post-campaign wrap reports that capture delivery performance, cost efficiency and key learnings for each site cluster.
• Maintain and report against a set of Marketing Operations KPIs: brief-to-launch cycle time, OTIF rate, stakeholder satisfaction, planning-horizon accuracy.
• Drive a continuous improvement culture — identifying and implementing process upgrades every quarter that reduce friction, improve speed or improve output quality.

Experience & Qualifications

• 7+ years in activity planning, marketing operations, traffic management or campaign management, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead role within a medium-to-large marketing team.
• Demonstrated experience managing high-volume, multi-site campaign programmes simultaneously across diverse geographic markets.
• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Project Management or a related field; PMP, Prince2 or equivalent project management certification advantageous.
• Proven track record of designing and scaling operational processes in a fast-growth environment.
• Experience working in or alongside field sales and distribution operations — familiarity with South African township market dynamics is a strong advantage.

Technical Skills

• Expert-level proficiency in project management platforms: Monday.com, Asana, Jira or equivalent enterprise PM tools.
• Daily, confident use of AI productivity tools (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) for brief writing, summarisation, reporting and workflow automation — this is non-negotiable.
• Strong command of Microsoft 365 (Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, SharePoint) and/or Google Workspace for reporting and communication.
• Familiarity with marketing workflow and campaign management systems; experience building or configuring dashboards is a strong advantage.

Leadership & Interpersonal Skills

• A natural systems thinker who spots process gaps before they become delivery failures.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills — able to distil complexity into clear, actionable briefs and stakeholder summaries.
• Strong stakeholder management: comfortable influencing without authority across Commercial, Brand, Finance and Field teams.
• High emotional intelligence and conflict-resolution skills — able to navigate competing priorities while maintaining team morale and momentum.
• A bias for action: this role does not wait to be told what to do.

AI PROFICIENCY REQUIREMENT

Client is an AI-native organisation. At the scale we are building towards, AI tools are not a productivity enhancement — they are a core operational capability. The Senior Activity Planning Manager is expected to:

• Use AI tools daily across brief writing, campaign reporting, scheduling conflict detection, document summarisation and stakeholder communications.
• Proactively identify new AI use cases that reduce manual coordination overhead and increase planning accuracy.
• Train and coach team members on AI-assisted workflows as the organisation scales.

Shortlisted candidates will complete an AI-enabled, task-based assessment as part of the selection process. Candidates who are not yet using AI tools daily are encouraged to upskill before applying.

Salary Package: Negotiable

If you are interested in the role, kindly send through your most recently updated CV to ***email_hidden***