Director / Head of Data Analytics

Reporting to: Senior Director, A&G Solutions Analytics

Are you a leader with a keen interest in data and innovation? Would you like to help us make data-driven decisions?

About the Team

The Product Analytics team turns behavioural and product data into insights that help us evaluate product changes, improve user experience, and influence product strategy. We work closely with Product Managers, UX Designers, Engineers, and senior stakeholders to understand user behaviour and identify opportunities with the greatest customer and business impact.

You will lead a dedicated team of 5–6 analysts embedded in the LeapSpace product organisation, as part of the wider A&G Solutions Analytics function of 30+ analysts located in Amsterdam and London. Your team works with product, commercial, and strategy stakeholders across the US, UK, and the Netherlands.

About the Role

This is a high-impact leadership role at the intersection of product, data, and commercial strategy. As Director of Product Analytics for LeapSpace, you will be the analytical authority for one of Elsevier's most strategically important products — shaping how we measure success, understand our users, and scale the business.

You will be a true thought partner to the LeapSpace leadership team, translating ambiguous strategic questions into rigorous analytical frameworks, and turning data into decisions. You will need to balance the nuances of a dual B2B/B2C product — where institutional procurement cycles, individual researcher adoption, and GenAI-driven engagement all interact — with a sharp commercial lens and a growth mindset.

What You Will Do

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of 5–6 analysts. Set priorities, build a high-performance culture, and enable analytical excellence while attracting and retaining top talent as LeapSpace scales.
• Partner closely with Product and Commercial teams to translate strategy into clear OKRs and success metrics. Shape analytical questions, challenge assumptions, and influence roadmap prioritisation and go-to-market decisions.
• Own analytics across the full growth funnel — activation, engagement, retention, and monetisation — across B2B and B2C segments. Build models and forecasts that inform commercial targets and identify key levers for sustainable, product-led growth.
• Analyse behavioural and transactional data to understand end-to-end user journeys, including adoption, engagement, conversion, retention, and satisfaction. Use cohort, funnel, segmentation, and feature analysis to generate actionable insights across researcher and institutional audiences.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and stakeholders to define and align KPIs with user value, business outcomes, and LeapSpace’s AI-driven proposition. Ensure robust tracking and data quality to support reliable measurement.
• Design and evaluate experiments, including A/B tests, to assess the impact of new features and product changes. Build predictive models to forecast performance and identify early signals of success or risk.
• Translate complex analyses into clear, compelling narratives through dashboards, presentations, and storytelling. Communicate effectively across product teams and senior leadership to drive data-informed decisions.
• Use AI tools to accelerate SQL, Python, analysis, visualisation, and documentation. Apply modern, GenAI-native working practices while maintaining strong human validation and judgement.

What You Bring

• Solid experience in product or digital analytics, with a proven track record of influencing product strategy and commercial decisions through data.
• Experience working across both institutional and consumer-facing digital products, with a strong understanding of user behaviour, adoption, engagement, and value creation across different audiences.
• Experience scaling products from early adoption to broader market growth, including defining key metrics at each stage and building scalable analytical frameworks.
• Proven experience leading, building, and developing high-performing analytics teams (5+ people).
• Strong ability to translate data insights into revenue, retention, and broader business impact, and to engage effectively with commercial stakeholders.
• Strong experience designing, running, and interpreting experiments in fast-moving and ambiguous product environments.
• Advanced SQL and Python (or R) for analysis, statistical modelling, and visualisation.
• Experience with cloud data platforms (e.g. Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks) and BI tools (e.g. Tableau or equivalent).
• Familiarity with web analytics tools (Adobe Analytics preferred).
• Experience with AI/LLM-assisted workflows (e.g. Claude, Codex).
• Strong ability to influence senior stakeholders across product and commercial teams. Clear and confident communicator with strong executive presence.
• Master's degree or higher with a quantitative focus (Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Economics, or a related field with strong statistical foundations) preferred, though equivalent experience will be considered.
• Genuine curiosity about users and products — you want to understand the 'why', not just report the 'what'.
• Growth mindset: enthusiasm for learning, comfortable with ambiguity, and not afraid to ask hard questions.
• Collaborative and humble, with high standards for analytical rigour and storytelling.
• Comfortable working in cross-functional, international, multi-location teams.

About LeapSpace

LeapSpace is Elsevier's new AI-assisted workspace for research — a fast-growing product that serves both institutional (B2B) and individual researcher (B2C) audiences. Built on trusted scientific content and responsible AI, LeapSpace brings together discovery, analysis, and collaboration in a single intelligent environment, helping researchers work more effectively.

LeapSpace is entering a pivotal growth phase, with significant investment and executive sponsorship as it scales adoption across the global research community.