Job title: Associate Director of Product Innovation
Location: East Hanover, NJ (3days onsite and 2 days remote)
Work Location:
One Health Plaza
USEH
East Hanover
NJ
USA
07936
Job Purpose:
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. SPT was established to seamlessly integrate strategy, data, AI, and platforms into a single powerhouse function, propelling our US Commercial organization forward. Our goal is to empower teams to move faster, make better informed decisions, and ultimately drive greater impact for patients and healthcare providers. Within SPT, you’ll discover how our teams lay the data foundations that fuel critical decision-making, develop and scale AI-driven products, and shepherd transformation programs that translate strategy into tangible business outcomes. The US CRM organization sits within SPT and plays a crucial role in driving the transformation to a next-generation Customer360 operating model.
Reporting to the Executive Director, CRM Labs, the Associate Director, CRM Innovation Labs supports the strategy, development, and execution of CRM Labs priorities across shaping, prototyping, and proof-of-concept activities. This role tactically implements the CRM Labs iterative innovation model by translating demand into disciplined experimentation that validates business value, user experience, and technical feasibility before enterprise commitment. The Associate Director partners closely with Product Owners, business stakeholders, IT, architecture, engineering, UX, analytics, privacy, legal, and compliance teams to run rapid, evidence-based cycles that refine, advance, or off-ramp ideas quickly and transparently while ensuring successful concepts are positioned for transition into scaled delivery through standard product road mapping and production processes.
Major Accountabilities:
- Execute the CRM Labs model: Run work through structured, timeboxed stages including ideation support, shaping, prototyping, review and decision, and proof-of-concept readiness.
- Lead tactical implementation of rapid prototyping: Plan and oversee prototype iterations with a time boxed lifecycles, ensuring disciplined scope and clear endpoints.
- Translate opportunities into testable concepts: Partner with Product Owners, business stakeholders, and technical teams to define value hypotheses, assumptions, success criteria, and practical build plans.
- Drive evidence-based decision making: Capture learnings from each cycle and prepare recommendations to refine, advance to proof of concept, or off-ramp initiatives based on business value, technical signal, and enterprise readiness.
- Coordinate cross-functional execution: Work across CRM Product, IT, architecture, engineering, UX, analytics, privacy, legal, security, and compliance teams to ensure experimentation is feasible, governed, and aligned to enterprise standards.
- Support proof-of-concept planning and transition: Clarify scope, dependencies, risks, governance needs, user involvement, and enterprise gates required to test in real environments.
- Protect production capacity and enterprise investment: Ensure Lab work remains focused on de-risking and does not become shadow delivery, unmanaged customization, or parallel production execution.
- Document and operationalize learnings: Produce concise outputs including findings, decision logs, opportunity assessments, prototype outcomes, and recommendations that inform product roadmap and scaled delivery decisions.
- Maintain governance, privacy, and compliance: Follow established guardrails for privacy, security, compliance, and data usage, especially as initiatives progress from prototype into proof of concept.
- Partner in demand intake and prioritization: Support regular triage of ideas from leadership, Product, business and field teams, DDIT, and lab-sourced opportunities, helping assess fit, readiness, and strategic value.
- Stay informed and bring back to Novartis the state of the art across enterprise CRM, generative AI, Agentic AI, deterministic AI, and data products
Key Performance Indicators:
- Prototype cycle speed: Progress experiments through shaping and prototype cycles within defined timeboxes, with clear decisions at the end of each cycle.
- Evidence-based outcomes: Deliver documented decisions to refine, advance, or off-ramp, supported by business value signal, feasibility insight, and stakeholder alignment.
- Quality of shaping: Ensure opportunities entering prototype have clear assumptions, value hypotheses, scope boundaries, and success criteria.
- Quality of execution: Deliver prototype outputs that are actionable, reusable, and suitable for decision making by product and production teams.
- Prototype-to-PoC readiness: Translate successful prototypes into well-defined proof-of-concept recommendations with understood dependencies, governance requirements, and delivery implications.
- Stakeholder confidence and satisfaction: Build trust with Product, business, and technical partners through clear collaboration, practical execution, and disciplined follow-through.
- Governance and compliance: Ensure Lab activities follow established governance, privacy, security, and compliance processes with appropriate documentation.
- Operational rigor: Maintain accurate documentation, decision logs, experiment outputs, and status reporting to support transparency and continuity.
- Enterprise protection: Protect roadmap capacity and enterprise investment by avoiding uncontrolled sprawl, lingering pilots, or shadow delivery.
- Learning velocity: Generate actionable learnings quickly enough to inform prioritization, scale decisions, and future innovation efforts.
- Transition effectiveness: Support clean handoff of validated concepts into standard product planning and production delivery processes where appropriate.
Idea Background
Navigate complexity
Education (minimum/desirable): Bachelor's degree in related field is required; Master of Science and/or MBA preferred
Language: Fuent English, other languages desirable
- Novartis seeks an accomplished innovation and product delivery leader with experience and demonstrated success translating emerging CRM opportunities into structured experiments, actionable learnings, and informed decisions regarding scale for commercial operations. Strong partnership, execution discipline, and intellectual maturity are needed. A comprehensive understanding of best practices in CRM, Data, and AI-enabled customer engagement is important to success in this role. Additional qualifications are as follows:
- Proven success executing rapid experimentation, prototyping, or proof-of-concept work that tests business value and feasibility before larger-scale investment
- 6+ years of experience in CRM, product management, innovation delivery, consulting, technology strategy, or related leadership roles, preferably in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, or CRM sectors
- Strong understanding of the CRM landscape (Sales, Marketing, and Service), including Salesforce (Agentforce, Data Cloud, core platform), Veeva, and adjacent technologies in the customer engagement ecosystem
- Understanding of CRM, AI, and data platforms and architectures (e.g. Salesforce, AWS, Veeva, OpenAI, Anthropic, Snowflake, or similar enterprise technologies)
- Experience translating ambiguous ideas into clear experiments, including framing the use case, defining assumptions, identifying success criteria, and shaping practical build plans
- Experience working across business and technical teams, including Product, architecture, engineering, UX, analytics, privacy, legal, compliance, and operations
- Strong operational discipline in agile delivery, work management, documentation, decision tracking, and transparent status communication
- Comfort working hands-on in iterative delivery cycles with a bias toward action, speed, learning, and practical outcomes over excessive polish
- Experience supporting governance in regulated environments, including privacy, security, compliance, and risk management considerations relevant to healthcare and customer engagement platforms
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to build stakeholder alignment, synthesize learnings, and recommend decisions grounded in business value and empirical evidence
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to interpret complex inputs, challenge assumptions, and adapt approaches in a rapidly evolving technological landscape
- Experience enabling the transition from prototype to production is preferred, including partnering with delivery teams to package outputs, define next steps, and minimize rework
Leadership Competencies:
Identify key issues in complex situations, keeping focused on the big picture and adapting and prioritizing during change.
Demonstrate long term vision by taking a broader view, thinking through indirect consequences and longer-term implications.
- Deliver collective impact
- Engage with others and integrate diverse perspectives from colleagues to achieve the best outcome for the enterprise.
- Demonstrate influence without authority, work and collaborate across boundaries.
- Challenge assumptions, make decisions grounded in data.
- Build situational awareness, adapt leadership style to enhance impact of others and performance of team
- Challenge assumptions, make decisions grounded in data.
- Build situational awareness, adapt leadership style to enhance impact of others and performance of team
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