Project Manager, Retail · Dubai · Contract · for Harry Freeman, Forsyth Barnes

Your ad says several projects.

That is the expensive word. It means more work than the team can land, and it means nobody has said out loud which one goes first.

So I did the part you would hire me for. Your other live Dubai req, on the same board, names the systems and the cutover this one does not mention. I read both, found a date collision, and wrote the sequencing call. It is below, and every date in it is public.

Ramona Furter
Zurich. Planning the move to Dubai.
Available with notice.

Where the cutover can actually land

This is my application for your Project Manager, Retail contract. The client is anonymous in the ad, which is normal, and I have not tried to work out who it is. I would not put that guess in writing.

I did not need to. Everything below is public and applies to every large retailer in the UAE, so it holds whoever your client is. Your RMS Senior Business Analyst req (Ref: 196995) only sharpens it, naming a Programme Lead, Omni-Channel and a stack of Oracle RMS (the merchandising master: item, price, stock), xStore and SAP S/4HANA. If that turns out to be a different programme, none of the dates below move.

WORKED EXAMPLE · The constraints are public and sourced. The verdicts are my read, not their plan. I have not seen it.
Your several projects all bend around one date: when the merchandising master goes live. Eight of the next ten months are closed to it. April is already selected; the rest are there if you want to test it.

Go

RULING · to the Programme Lead, Omni-Channel

April 2027. Q4 goes on the data cleanse.

The trading calendar and the tax authority have already taken your Q4. White Friday is 27 November, the Shopping Festival opens in the first week of December, and every large UAE business has to be live on structured e-invoicing on 1 January, on S/4HANA, with the same finance and integration people. The first clean window after that is April 2027, once Eid has passed and before summer empties the team. May works too, and costs you Eid al-Adha and your hypercare bench.

Someone will ask for Q4 2026 to land it in this fiscal year. My answer is no. You would be stabilising a brand-new item, price and stock master through the two weeks that make your year. A wrong stock file during the Shopping Festival costs more than a quarter of reporting optics.

What I would do with Q4 instead: run the item, price and hierarchy cleanse now. It is the long pole, it does not need the new system, nobody ever budgets for it, and it is what actually slips cutovers. Your own BA req already lists data integrity as a worry, which tells me someone there knows this.

You may have a reason I cannot see from outside. A licence expiry, a landlord, a board date. That is my first question in week one.

The fit, and where it stops

01

Your ad stresses stakeholder management. That is the part I do best.

Saying no to a senior stakeholder with a reason and a counter-offer, the way the ruling above does, is the job. At Brixel I was the bridge between senior client stakeholders and the internal product team, owning the partnerships with UBS and Baloise. At Ifolor I reported to C-level and ran a cross-functional team plus external agencies, with the budget and the resourcing.

BRIXEL, LEAD PROJECT MANAGER, 2023 TO 2024 · IFOLOR GROUP, SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER, 2024 TO 2025

02

eCommerce delivery I can put numbers against.

I owned the e-commerce ecosystem and strategy for a CHF 100M+ consumer business and moved it: +9% conversion and +15% checkout step rate, through research, A/B testing and analytics. Before that, my first years were the trade side of retail: promotion planning, assortment and pricing, negotiating with international brand manufacturers.

IFOLOR GROUP · CHF 100M+ OWNED · +9% CONVERSION · +15% CHECKOUT STEP RATE

03

What I am not, so you can rule me out in ten seconds.

I have never run an Oracle RMS programme and I have never managed a store estate. My retail depth is e-commerce and the trade side, not merchandising systems. I am in Zurich, planning the move to Dubai with my partner, and available with notice, not next week.

That gives a clean test. If the cutover is locked for Q4 2026, the timing does not work, and I would rather you knew that now. If it lands in spring, my notice period is not the constraint, and what you would be hiring is the sequencing and the stakeholder work rather than another pair of merchandising hands.

SWISS CITIZEN · ZURICH · AVAILABLE WITH NOTICE

Work history

Full CV as a PDF is one click away, at the bottom and here.

SINCE JAN 2026

AI Project Lead, Business Development

Swiss Post, Advertising · Zurich

Leads AI-driven business models from opportunity sizing to a prioritised roadmap with KPIs. Build-vs-buy and cost-vs-benefit calls; delivery from concept to launch.

SINCE DEC 2023

Founder · Pedal Peak

Own venture · live product, real users

A cycling platform I built end to end: SvelteKit, Cloudflare, the Strava API, n8n. Also smedium, a small studio doing branding and websites.

AUG TO DEC 2025

In between jobs and own ventures

Self-employed

Built smedium to its first clients, grew Pedal Peak, and went deep on AI tooling: own tools with LLMs, prompt engineering, AI-supported production. Also cycled across Togo and Benin.

OCT 2024 TO JUL 2025

Senior Product Manager, Lead E-Commerce

Ifolor Group · Zurich

Owned the e-commerce ecosystem and strategy for a CHF 100M+ business, reporting to C-level. +9% conversion, +15% checkout step rate. Led a cross-functional team plus external agencies; owned budget, resourcing and KPIs.

JUN 2023 TO SEP 2024

Lead Project Manager

Brixel · Zurich

Owned partnerships with financial institutions (UBS, Baloise) that drove growth. The main bridge between senior client stakeholders and the internal product team.

MAR 2020 TO MAY 2023

Marketing & Growth Lead, Founding Team

WePractice (Sparrow Ventures / Migros Group)

Founding team of a health venture: 2 funding rounds closed, grew to 10 locations, 23 people, 170+ customers. Built the full go-to-market, hypothesis and data driven (1000+ client matches in year one).

SEP 2019 TO SEP 2022

Growth & Venture Builder

Sparrow Ventures · Zurich

Built growth and go-to-market for several internal startups, from validation to scale-up. Experimentation to lift conversion and cut CAC.

JAN 2017 TO AUG 2019

Intrapreneur, Innovation

Die Mobiliar · Bern

Market pilots from MVP to launch: Smide (now BOND Mobility), XpertCheck, Lizzy. Owned development and operation of the MVPs; briefed and managed external agencies.

Earlier, and the reason I know the trade side of retail: Junior Trade Marketing Manager at Promena (2016), running an own brand portfolio end to end with promotion planning, procurement steering and direct negotiation with international brand manufacturers. Junior Product Manager at Cruspi (2014 to 2015), consumer and trade promotions for distribution brands. Assistant Product Manager at Domaco (2010 to 2014). Accountant at Kuoni and AMAG (2008 to 2010). Commercial apprenticeship at Bridgestone Switzerland (2005 to 2008).

Education: BBA Business Administration (Betriebsökonomie), Zentrum Bildung Baden. Certified Mental Health Coach, IPC Academy Zurich. CAS Digital Marketing, HWZ Zurich. CAS Innovation, BFH Bern. Diploma Online Marketing incl. Google Ads.  ·  Languages: German native, English fluent, French conversational.

About me

I started out reconciling debtor accounts, moved into product marketing for FMCG brands, spent five years building ventures that mostly did not work and two that did, and now lead AI business models at Swiss Post. The through-line is that I like being the person who finds the thing everyone is politely not saying.

The Dubai move is real and it is ours: my partner and I decided on it, and I am working through notice, not browsing. I would rather tell you that up front than have you find out in week three.

This page was designed and built by me with the AI toolchain I use every day, the same one I use for Pedal Peak. It took an afternoon and two of your own job ads. That is the point I would rather make than write “detail-oriented” on a CV.