Operational Excellence, Instrumentation R&D Lead

Organizational Health, Ways of Working, and Culture

• Establish an organizational-health framework that provides insight into operating effectiveness, role and decision clarity, collaboration, change readiness, leadership follow-through, and employee enablement.
• Combine performance data, employee listening, stakeholder feedback, and operating observations to identify systemic barriers affecting execution and organizational effectiveness.
• Partner with leaders to translate organizational health insights into prioritized interventions with clear ownership, milestones, adoption measures, and expected outcomes.
• Strengthen ways of working through clear decision rights, effective governance, disciplined escalation, simplified interfaces, and visible accountability.
• Build a culture in which teams surface problems early, resolve root causes using evidence, share learning, and sustain improvements without reliance on heroic effort.

Process Excellence and Product Development Acceleration

• Establish and maintain a product development excellence framework covering principles, standard practices, decision criteria, measures, and governance across the development lifecycle.
• Map end-to-end workflows and identify bottlenecks, rework, delays, avoidable handoffs, duplicative activity, and other sources of friction.
• Lead Lean and structured problem-solving initiatives that improve flow, shorten feedback loops, simplify work, and increase reuse without compromising quality, safety, or regulatory requirements.
• Identify and prioritize Operational Excellence initiatives based on strategic value, product development impact, feasibility, organizational readiness, and measurable benefit.
• Evaluate automation, analytics, digital tools, modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that can accelerate learning, increase capacity, improve quality, and strengthen decisions.
• Pilot improvements, validate results, capture lessons learned, and scale successful practices across the global organization.

Product Development Performance

• Create an integrated view of development performance, including flow, decision latency, milestone predictability, quality, risk retirement, reuse, and launch readiness.
• Identify recurring issues across products and platforms, distinguish local execution challenges from systemic constraints, and lead cross-organizational solutions where shared intervention creates value.
• Partner with product, technical, quality, operations, and launch-readiness leaders to improve development outcomes while preserving their respective accountabilities.
• Ensure improvement priorities are tied to measurable effects on product outcomes, organizational capacity, employee experience, strategic capability, and sustainable value.

Global Best Practices and Capability Building

• Identify, validate, document, and scale effective practices across engineering disciplines, functions, sites, product teams, and relevant external benchmarks.
• Translate proven improvements into practical standards, playbooks, templates, toolkits, training, and adoption mechanisms, allowing justified variation based on product, technology, risk, and regulatory needs.
• Coach leaders and teams in Lean, structured problem solving, change leadership, and continuous-improvement methods.
• Build internal capability so leaders and teams can identify, implement, and sustain improvements as part of everyday work.

Performance Management and Value Realization

• Establish a balanced performance-management system covering organizational health, process effectiveness, product development performance, adoption, capabilities, and realized value.
• Develop dashboards and operating reviews that support fact-based decisions, visible accountability, timely corrective action, and organizational learning.
• Define business cases and success measures for improvement initiatives and track delivery from diagnostic through implementation and sustainment.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews to verify outcomes, confirm adoption, identify unintended consequences, and capture additional improvement opportunities.

What You'll Bring To Alcon

• Bachelor's Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +18 yrs; Assoc.+14 yrs; M.S.+7 yrs; PhD+6 yrs)
• The ability to fluently read, write, understand and communicate in English
• 10 Years of Relevant Experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, science, industrial engineering, operations management, business, or a related discipline required. Advanced degree preferred.
• R&D environment: Demonstrated success improving complex product development or engineering organizations.
• Experience in medical devices, healthcare technology, life sciences, or another regulated industry is strongly preferred.
• Transformation leadership: Proven record of leading cross-functional change from diagnosis through implementation, adoption, value realization, and sustainment in a global matrix organization.
• Methods: Strong knowledge of Lean, Six Sigma, structured problem solving, process design, change management, KPI systems, organizational-health measurement, and benefits realization.
• Digital and analytics: Experience using data visualization, analytics, automation, AI, or other digital technologies to improve decisions, productivity, quality, or organizational effectiveness.
• Certification: Lean Six Sigma certification or equivalent practical expertise preferred. Change-management or project-management certification is beneficial.