Director, Franchise Strategy - Independent Bottlers

About the job

Job Description Summary:

Role Type: Individual Contributor Reports into: Vice President, Integrated Ops - Independent Bottlers

This leadership role is accountable for supporting and constructively challenging the Franchise organization 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 & Requirements:

- 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.

What can help you be successful in this role?

Growth Behavior:

- Growth Mindset: Demonstrates Curiosity. Welcomes failure as a learning opportunity.

- Smart Risk: Makes bold decisions/recommendations.

- Externally Focused: Understands the upstream and downstream implications of his/her work.

- Performance Driven & Accountable: Has high-performance standards. Outperforms her/his peers.

- Fast/Agile: Removes barriers to move faster. Experiments and adapts. Thrives under pressure and at a fast pace.

- Empowered: Brings solutions instead of problems. Challenges the status quo. Has the courage to take an unpopular stance.

Leadership Behavior

- Act Like an Owner: Deliver results, creating value for our brands, our System, our customers and key stakeholders.

- Collaborate with the System, Customers and Key Stakeholders

- Develops Self and Others: Develop self and support others' development to achieve their full potential.

- Drive Innovation: Generate new or unique solutions and embrace new ideas that help sustain our business.

What We Can Do For You

- Career growth and development: Leveraging our boundaryless network, we provide access to educational platforms and provide coaching, mentoring and feedback, as a part of our Leadership & Development process.

- Diverse and inclusive culture: You’ll be embraced for who you are and empowered to use your voice to help others find theirs. We want to make our culture inevitable.

- International Experience: Become part of international projects and work along multicultural teams, through our global network.

Skills:

Location(s): India City/Cities: Gurugram Travel Required: 00% - 25% Relocation Provided: No Job Posting End Date: October 30, 2026 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.