Associate Director, CRM Product Owner

About the Role:

Reporting to CRM Product Management leadership, the Associate Director, CRM Product Owner supports the strategy, development, and delivery of priority CRM capabilities across the US CRM ecosystem. This role partners with business 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 enabling process improvements, technology enhancements, analytics, and user experience updates—while ensuring solutions meet governance, privacy, and compliance expectations.

Major Accountabilities

• Own and deliver a defined product area: Drive end-to-end delivery for a set of CRM capabilities (e.g., field productivity, customer engage-ment workflows, medical engagement) from discovery through release and hypercare.
• Translate business needs into requirements: Partner with stake-holders to gather, document, and prioritize requirements; define user stories, acceptance criteria, and success measures.
• Manage and refine the backlog: Maintain a healthy backlog (prioritization, refinement cadence, dependencies, definition of ready/done) aligned to quarterly/PI planning and stakeholder priorities.
• Drive disciplined agile execution: Work with delivery teams to plan, execute, and track work; remove blockers; manage scope trade-offs; and ensure predictable, high-quality releases.
• Improve processes and user experience: Identify pain points in cur-rent workflows and propose enhancements; validate solutions with users; and support change adoption with clear documentation and enablement.
• Partner across business and IT: Coordinate with CRM product man-agers, architecture, analytics, privacy/legal, and commercial/medical stakeholders to align on requirements, sequencing, and release readiness.
• Ensure governance, privacy, and compliance: Follow established governance processes and support risk assessments to ensure solutions meet regulatory, privacy, security, and data standards.
• Mentor and coordinate delivery resources: Provide day-to-day direction to extended team members (e.g., analysts, contractors) and con-tribute to capability building across the product owner community.
• Support change enablement and adoption: Partner with training and communications leads to ensure releases are understood, adopted, and measured; incorporate feedback into iterative improvements.
• Communicate status and outcomes: Provide concise updates on roadmap items, risks, decisions needed, and measurable outcomes to product management leadership and stakeholders.
• Contribute to product strategy and continuous improvement: Bring market/industry insights, user feedback, and performance data to inform roadmap recommendations and operational improvements.
• Maintain platform and domain awareness: Stay current on CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Veeva) and evolving best practices; apply learnings pragmatically within the Novartis ecosystem.

Key Performance Indicators

• Value delivered: Demonstrate measurable outcomes for the owned capability area (e.g., time saved, improved data quality, increased engagement) aligned to agreed KPIs.
• Release predictability and quality: Deliver on committed release timelines and scope with strong quality (defect rates, post-release stability, and support volume).
• Backlog health: Maintain an actionable, prioritized backlog with clear user stories and acceptance criteria; manage dependencies and technical debt transparently.
• Adoption and user satisfaction: Improve adoption and satisfaction for released features (training completion, usage analytics, stakeholder feedback/CSAT).
• Process improvement outcomes: Deliver documented workflow improvements with measurable benefit; ensure changes are sustained through standard operating practices.
• Stakeholder alignment: Achieve timely decisions and alignment across key partners; minimize rework through strong discovery and clear documentation.
• Governance and compliance: Ensure deliverables follow established governance, privacy, and compliance processes with audit-ready documentation.
• Team effectiveness: Receive strong feedback from delivery teams and stakeholders on clarity, collaboration, and execution; contribute to a positive, high-performing team culture.
• Communication and enablement: Provide clear release notes, training/support materials, and stakeholder updates that improve readiness and adoption.
• Cost awareness: Support cost-conscious delivery by identifying reuse opportunities, avoiding unnecessary customization, and escalating risks/impacts early.
• Operational rigor: Maintain accurate documentation, decision logs, and delivery reporting to support transparency and operational excellence.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in related field is required;
• Master of Science and/or MBA preferred

Additional qualifications are as follows:

• Proven success in driving product management capabilities for large-scale CRM implementations.
• 5-7+ years of experience in product management, technology strategy, innovation, or leadership roles, preferably in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, or CRM sectors
• Deep understanding of the CRM landscape (Sales, Marketing and Service), including Salesforce (Agentforce, Marketing Cloud, Health Cloud, Data360, Core plat-form), Veeva, and the major and evolving players in the ecosystem.
• Understanding of CRM, AI, and Data platforms and architectures (e.g., Salesforce, Salesforce Data Cloud, Veeva, OpenAI, Snowflake, or similar data lake technologies).
• Experience being accountable for the operations of product management including backlog health and prioritization, agile practices and ceremonies, and driving strategic innovation
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to build stakeholder buy-in and alignment
• Experience in AI-supported product management techniques including LLM sup-ported user-story creation and process mapping
• Must possess an ability to foster cross-functional alignment of key stakeholders to create a disciplined, ambitious, and collaborative, global, commercial CRM strategy
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to interpret complex data and make informed decisions
• Ability to adapt strategies and approaches in a rapidly evolving technological landscape
• Navigate complexity
• Enable impactful and fast decision-making.
• 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.

Location: East Hanover, NJ Hybrid (3 days (Mon-Thurs), 2 remote)

Pay Rate: $62/hour - $85/hour W-2 Only (based on Education/Experience)

Contract: 12-month

Health, dental, vision, 401k (provided minimum eligibility hours are met)