Head of Global Product Quality and Technical

Main Purpose of the Role

The Head of Global Product Quality and Technical provides strategic leadership and strong governance for the organisation’s global product quality and regulatory agenda. The role will require a lot of experience in transforming teams and policies whilst maintaining commercial balance and demonstrating excellent stakeholder management across a very large business organisation. Policies and global product quality standards will need to be at the forefront alongside galvanizing the team. The role will partner closely with regional and cross‑functional leaders to work with and embed a unified quality culture, elevate supplier quality performance, mitigate risk, and drive continuous improvement across the global supply chain. Within the role there must also be a track record of regulatory compliance understanding and skillset. Specsavers is growing across the globe and across new product categories and expertise in navigating a complex regulatory environment is essential.  

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership & Governance
  • Define and implement a global product quality vision, strategy, and roadmap aligned with business growth, category expansion, and customer expectations.
  • Embed, govern and continuously improve global product quality policies, standards, and ways of working across all categories and regions.
  • Set enterprise-wide quality objectives and KPIs; report global performance, risks, and improvement plans to executive leadership.
    
    
• Regulatory & Compliance
  • Serve as senior regulatory authority, ensuring compliance with global, regional, and market‑specific regulations.
  • Oversee regulatory lifecycle: pre‑market approvals/registrations where applicable, technical documentation, labelling/claims, and post‑market surveillance.
  • Lead and be responsible for incident management and regulatory engagement, including escalation, investigations, field actions/recalls, and evidence‑based decision‑making.
    
    
• Supplier Quality & Manufacturing Excellence
  • Establish supplier quality standards and performance frameworks, drive qualification, onboarding, and continuous improvement programs across products and various supply bases.
  • Oversee supplier audits, process capability evaluation, and change management control; ensure robust traceability and conformity of new, incoming materials and components.
    
    
• Cross‑Functional Partnership & Culture
  • Build strong partnerships with Legal, Category Operations, Manufacturing & Distribution, Product , Demand Planning, and Logistics as a minimum.
  • Facilitate knowledge sharing, training, and capability building on quality and regulatory requirements across regions and business units.
    
    
• Quality Analytics, Insights & Performance
  • Lead the Quality Analytics team to develop a simple data driven framework where currently nothing exists. This is to include as a minimum, predictive analytics, dashboards, and real‑time monitoring tools.
  • Integrate quality performance with commercial and operational KPIs to support margin protection and business growth.
    
    
• Incident Management, Crisis & Business Continuity
  • Confidently lead major quality incident responses, recalls, and regulatory escalations; represent the function during crisis management routines, post‑incident reviews, and systemic fixes. Lessons learned and post issue reviews to ensure mitigation of future similar incidents.
  • Agility with working cross territories when incidents happen, providing real time updates to the SCLT as a minimum and working with the team to support the same.
    
    
• Leadership & Talent Development
  • Lead and energize a potential high‑performing global quality team across the four pillars with enthusiasm, energy, clear mandates and harmonized behavioral standards.
  • Develop leaders’ technical depth and decision quality; build succession, coaching, and capability uplift across the team and regions.

Skills, Ability or Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Quality Management, or related technical discipline; Master’s degree preferred.
• Fluency in both Cantonese and Mandarin, with the ability to speak, read, and write Chinese confidently, enabling daily technical, regulatory, and commercial communication with suppliers, manufacturers, and testing partners across China and Asia.
• Strong strategic capability with a track record of developing and operationalizing unified quality strategies and building teams fit for the future across challenging retail landscapes.
• Deep technical expertise in QMS and global regulatory compliance (e.g., ISO13485, ISO9001).
• Excellent stakeholder management, influential people skills, and balanced and capable negotiation skills across colleagues, regions and cultures.
• Manage testing with new product development across new markets and new materials with a pulse on regulatory complexity.
• Significant experience in supplier quality management and resolving complex cross‑border quality issues.
• Exceptional communication skills suited to diverse, global environments.
• Financially astute, with experience owning and managing global quality budgets.
• Skilled in quality crisis leadership, incident response, and risk mitigation.
• High cross‑cultural competence and ability to operate effectively in complex, global environments.
• Proven product background within quality and wide portfolio of different product experiences at well-known retail organizations.
• Ability to manage external testing houses and leverage commercial value.