Associate Director, Product Management

Job Description Summary #LI-Hybrid This position will be located at East Hanover, NJ site and will not have the ability to be located remotely. This position will require 10% travel as defined by the business (domestic and/ or international). Job description summary Novartis is on a mission to transform medicine and improve lives worldwide. As a global leader in healthcare, we leverage advanced technology and data to deliver patient-centric solutions, enhance customer engagement, and drive innovation. We collaborate closely with the US business, bringing insights and challenging ideas to empower smarter, data-driven decision-making. The US CRM organization sits within Strategy, Platforms & Transformation (SPT) – AI & Platform Products and plays a crucial role in driving the transformation to a next-generation Customer360 operating model. Novartis seeks an accomplished product leader with a track record of turning business demand from multiple commercial functions into a well-managed data product backlog. Strong prioritization judgment, stakeholder partnership, and hands-on data fluency are essential to success in this role. Partnering closely with the Director, PO Audience Activation & Marketing Intelligence, the Associate Director, Audience Activation Product Manager supports the strategy, development, and delivery of priority capabilities, particularly from a data activation & enablement perspective, across the US CRM ecosystem. Novartis is transforming its CRM ecosystem, and this role will play a key role in enabling this. The role partners with business, peer SPT and technology teams to translate customer and field needs into clear requirements, manage a prioritized backlog, and drive execution through agile delivery. The Associate Director helps improve how Novartis engages customers by prioritizing process improvements through scalable technology enhancements, analytics, and user experience updates - while ensuring solutions meet governance, privacy, and compliance expectations. Job Description Key Responsibilities: • Own and deliver a defined product area: Lead end-to-end delivery of assigned data-centric capabilities, such as platform & data integrations, data ingestion, transformation, and unified customer profile management, and enabling CRM capabilities & workflows, from discovery through release, hypercare, enhancements, and ongoing maintenance. • Drive prioritization: Continuously prioritize and de-prioritize backlog items with the Director based on platform capacity, strategic alignment, and cross-functional trade-offs, and communicate decisions to stakeholders. • Lead and manage the scrum team: lead a dedicated scrum team through sprint ceremonies, backlog grooming, and capacity planning; remove blockers, manage dependencies, and protect team velocity and morale. • Partner across business and IT: Coordinate with CRM product managers, architecture, analytics, privacy/legal, and commercial/medical stakeholders to align on requirements, sequencing, and release readiness. • Represent data activation platform in CRM planning: represent CRM function needs in platform-level planning, architecture discussions; partner with the Director and other function product managers to ensure coherent, platform-wide decision-making. • Support data modeling: Analyze existing customer and operational data sources to support unification, identity resolution, and schema design decisions for new use cases. • Partner with Data Foundations: Work with data engineers and architects to define and validate data models, ingestion flows, and harmonization logic; support the creation of user stories and functional requirements for technical teams. • Enable activation: Work with the scrum team and data analysts to design and validate segments, calculated insights, and data activation strategies in alignment with business needs. Experience: Novartis seeks an accomplished product management leader with a track record managing data platform capabilities within commercial operations and demonstrated success transforming CRM capabilities within commercial operations. Strong prioritization judgment, stakeholder partnership, and hands-on data fluency are essential to success in this role. Essential Requirements: • Education: Bachelor's degree in a related field is required; Master of Science and/or MBA preferred • Minimum 5+ years of product management experience, with a strong track record in data platforms, enterprise SaaS, or platform/enablement product roles. • Hands-on knowledge, preferably Salesforce Data 360 (Data Cloud), including its implementation , capabilities, data model, architecture, and how it supports data activation across business functions; this is a core requirement for the role. • Deep understanding of the CRM landscape (Sales, Marketing and Service) and how field use cases drive data activation requirements . CRM familiarity preferred across Salesforce (Agentforce, Marketing Cloud, Health Cloud, Data360, Core platform), Veeva, and the major and evolving players in the ecosystem. • Understanding of Data platforms, CRM, and AI and architectures (e.g., Salesforce, Salesforce Data Cloud, Veeva, OpenAI, Snowflake, or similar data lake technologies). • Demonstrated experience managing a scrum team end-to-end: from roadmap definition through sprint execution and delivery. • Excellent cross-functional stakeholder management and experience working across multiple product organizations, aligning priorities, and building trust without direct authority. • Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to translate complex platform concepts for business audiences and business requirements for technical teams. Highly Preferred: • Familiarity with cross-product integration patterns, including APIs, data pipelines, and activation workflows. • Background in pharma, life sciences, or a similarly regulated, data-intensive industry. • Experience working in a matrixed organization where multipl