Associate Director, Product Management

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. 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.

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.

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 multiple product functions share a common platform infrastructure.
• Agile/Scrum certification or equivalent formal training.