Change & Release Lead — Fast-Paced Retail Tech

Halfords Careers; Redditch; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Car allowance

Annual discretionary bonus

Pension

Life assurance

25 days annual leave + bank holidays

Employee discounts

Hybrid working

Job summary

Halfords is seeking a Change & Release Manager to lead governance, coordination and continuous improvement of change and release processes. You will ensure new technology and platform updates are introduced with minimal disruption while balancing control and agility in a 24/7 retail tech environment.

You’ll collaborate with Technology and the wider organisation to assess risk, manage release schedules and drive a modern change enablement approach.

Qualifications

• Proven experience managing technology change and release processes within complex enterprise environments.
• Strong understanding of modern change management practices, balancing effective risk management with fast, efficient delivery.
• Experience coordinating releases across multiple teams, technologies and platforms.
• Data-driven mindset, using performance metrics and insights to improve change success rates and release effectiveness.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate at all levels.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the organisation’s Change Management framework, ensuring technology changes are assessed, prioritised and delivered with the right level of governance, control and risk management.
• Coordinate release planning across technology teams, ensuring changes are scheduled effectively to minimise operational risk and service disruption.
• Champion safe, efficient technology delivery by embedding change processes that support modern ways of working while maintaining appropriate operational oversight.
• Lead change governance activities, facilitating advisory forums and ensuring risks, dependencies and operational readiness are clearly understood and managed.
• Provide clear and timely communication of planned changes and releases, giving stakeholders visibility of upcoming activities and potential business impacts.
• Drive operational readiness for technology releases, ensuring new and enhanced capabilities are supported through appropriate testing, validation and cross-functional coordination.
• Monitor and report on change performance, analysing success rates, failed changes and service impacts to identify trends and continuous improvement opportunities.
• Work closely with Service Assurance, Incident & Resilience, Engineering and Delivery teams to ensure changes are introduced safely and lessons learned are embedded into future processes.
• Continually improve change and release practices, reducing unnecessary complexity and process friction while maintaining service stability in a fast-paced 24/7 environment.
• Act as a trusted subject matter expert, promoting best practice and fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration and continuous improvement across Technology and the wider business.

Skills

Change management

Release planning

Stakeholder management

Risk assessment

Operational readiness

Communication

Tools

ServiceNow

Job description

Halfords is seeking a Change & Release Manager to lead governance, coordination and continuous improvement of change and release processes. You will ensure new technology and platform updates are introduced with minimal disruption while balancing control and agility in a 24/7 retail tech environment.

You’ll collaborate with Technology and the wider organisation to assess risk, manage release schedules and drive a modern change enablement approach.