Director, Global Laboratory Digital Platform
Merck
Summary
Within Digital Manufacturing and the laboratory domain, this Director will lead the product strategy, experience, implementation, and value realization of a global laboratory digital platform. The role will connect opportunities across Research, Development, Manufacturing, Quality, and IT, translating shared needs and emerging possibilities into a coherent roadmap, scalable capabilities, and meaningful improvements in laboratory work.
Job description
By making laboratory information more accessible, connected, and contextualized, the platform will strengthen results interpretation, reporting, analytics, and data-informed decision-making across the laboratory network. The Director will combine established product ownership capabilities, strong technology acumen, and an entrepreneurial, outside-in perspective.
What You Will Do
- Shape Product Strategy, Operating Model, and Cross-Domain Opportunities: Establish a compelling product vision and translate it into a sequenced roadmap, investment choices, and measurable outcomes.
- Help establish the product operating model, governance, decision rights, demand-management practices, and partnerships needed to steward an evolving portfolio of laboratory capabilities.
- Convene partners across Research, Development, Manufacturing, Quality, Digital, Data, and IT to identify opportunities that may not be visible within a single function, test their significance, and guide them from initial concept through implementation and realized benefit.
- Bring an Outside-In Innovation Perspective: Monitor relevant developments across startups, technology providers, scientific ecosystems, and adjacent industries.
- Distinguish durable signals from short-lived trends, introduce new perspectives constructively, and create disciplined pathways for exploration, experimentation, adoption, and scale.
- Lead Product Stewardship, Community Engagement, and User Experience: Provide product leadership from discovery and problem definition through experience design, prioritization, delivery, deployment, operation, and continuous evolution.
- Cultivate an engaged laboratory user community through regular listening channels, demonstrations, research, co-design, and transparent communication of product decisions.
- Establish continuous feedback loops, identify patterns across user groups, and partner with process owners, designers, and change leaders to ensure the roadmap and end-to-end experience remain grounded in user outcomes, strategic intent, product evidence, and equitable representation of the broader community.
- Orchestrate Implementation, Rollout, and Adoption: Define the implementation strategy, release sequence, readiness criteria, and feedback mechanisms required to introduce capabilities successfully across functions and sites.
- Integrate technology delivery with process design, data readiness, support, learning, communications, and coordinated change campaigns that build understanding, participation, and sustained use.
- Mobilize a Multidisciplinary Delivery Network: Create clarity across product, design, architecture, engineering, data, integration, cybersecurity, quality, validation, service management, and vendor teams.
- Set outcomes and decision boundaries, resolve competing priorities, remove impediments, and enable specialists to lead within their respective disciplines.
- Connect Product, Architecture, Data, and Laboratory Capabilities: Partner with architecture and engineering leaders to translate product choices into secure, scalable, interoperable, and supportable capabilities.
- Remain sufficiently hands-on to explore data, interrogate APIs, evaluate technical options, and develop lightweight prototypes that clarify opportunities or accelerate learning.
- Guide initiatives involving connected instruments, workflow orchestration, automation, contextualized laboratory data, reporting, advanced analytics, and responsible artificial intelligence while promoting reusable capabilities across scientific, quality, operational, and enterprise processes.
- Establish Value Realization and Sustainable Operations: Define success measures, adoption indicators, baseline performance, and expected benefits for major product capabilities.
- Use evidence from users, operations, analytics, and delivery to inform prioritization and investment.
- Partner with service and platform teams to establish fit-for-purpose lifecycle, release, support, reliability, service-performance, business-continuity, and continuous-improvement practices, including regular evaluation of support-model effectiveness and the user experience.
- Integrate Risk, Quality, Security, and Investment Decisions: Engage internal quality, validation, cybersecurity, privacy, data-integrity, finance, and portfolio specialists early enough to shape responsible choices.
- Contribute to business cases, sequencing, capacity decisions, vendor selections, and investment roadmaps by balancing strategic value, user benefit, feasibility, risk, cost, and time to value.
- Communicate with Clarity and Influence: Articulate product direction, opportunity choices, progress, risks, adoption, and realized value to delivery teams, governance bodies, sponsors, and senior stakeholders.
- Translate complex scientific, operational, and technical considerations into decisions that diverse audiences can act upon.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Life Sciences, Business, Design, or a related discipline.
- Eight or more (8+) years of progressive experience in digital product management, product ownership, platform delivery, technology innovation, or a related field.
- Demonstrated success leading a significant digital product or platform across discovery, experience design, delivery, rollout, adoption, and continued evolution.
- Strong command of product ownership and product strategy, including opportunity framing, continuous discovery, roadmap development, evidence-based prioritization, user-community engagement, outcome measurement, and lifecycle stewardship.
- Demonstrated technology acumen and practical proficiency commensurate with technical product management, including the ability to understand solution architecture, data flows, integrations, APIs, cloud capabilities, analytics, and emerging technologies; evaluate technical options; and engage credibly with engineering, architecture, and data specialists.
- Experience operating in a startup, high-growth technology company, product-led business, enterprise innovation environment, or comparable setting characterized by ambiguity, experimentation, resourcefulness, and accelerated learning.
- Demonstrated ability to convene and influence stakeholders across scientific, operational, product, design, data, and technology domains while guiding multidisciplinary teams through clear outcomes and shared accountability.
- Strong strategic judgment and communication skills, with the ability to assess opportunities, make informed tradeoffs, translate ambition into executable increments, and engage effectively with users, delivery teams, and senior stakeholders.
- Experience delivering digital products in life sciences, laboratory operations, manufacturing, healthcare, or another complex scientific or operational environment, with particular value placed on direct experience in laboratories or with laboratory instruments and instrument-enabled workflows.
- Experience operating within GxP-regulated environments, including familiarity with data integrity, Computer Systems Assurance, risk-based validation, quality expectations, and compliance by design.
- Knowledge of laboratory processes and technology environments, including instrument workflows, connected instruments, automation, edge and cloud capabilities, laboratory informatics, data platforms, integration patterns, and adjacent quality or manufacturing systems.
- Experience across method development, method transfer, validation, release testing, stability testing, or comparable laboratory workflows is particularly relevant.
- Experience applying human-centered design, service design, journey mapping, experimentation, or product analytics to improve user experience, community engagement, and adoption.
- Experience enabling accessible, contextualized data and scaling practical opportunities involving reporting, advanced analytics, machine learning, or artificial intelligence.
- Experience introducing products across multiple functions, locations, or user communities through coordinated rollout, communication, learning, change, and external partnership strategies.
Benefits
- Medical, Dental & Vision
- 401(k) Matching
- Paid Holidays
- Vacation
- Compassionate Leave
- Sick Days
- Annual Bonus
- Long-Term Incentive
Company overview
Merck & Co., Inc., known as Merck in the United States and Canada and MSD (Merck Sharp & Dohme) internationally, is a premier American multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Rahway, New Jersey. Founded in 1891 as the U.S. subsidiary of the German Merck Group, the company became independent following World War I and has since grown into one of the world's largest biomedical companies, ranking fourth globally by revenue. Merck operates across three core business segments: pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and animal health products. The company is renowned for its groundbreaking research and development, having brought numerous life-saving medicines to market including Keytruda (pembrolizumab), a leading immunotherapy for cancer treatment that generated $29.5 billion in 2024 revenue, and Gardasil, a revolutionary HPV vaccine. With approximately 75,000 employees worldwide, Merck maintains a robust pipeline of innovative therapies focused on oncology, vaccines, hospital acute care, cardiology, neuroscience, virology, immunology, and diabetes. The company invests heavily in R&D, spending $17.9 billion in 2024 alone, demonstrating its commitment to advancing scientific discovery. Merck's legacy spans over 130 years of bringing hope to humanity through important medicines and vaccines, operating with a purpose to use leading-edge science to save and improve lives globally while fostering an inclusive workforce and responsible business practices.