Job Description

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. 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. Drawing on experience from startups, technology companies, adjacent industries, and evolving digital practices, the leader will challenge assumptions, illuminate new opportunities, and convert promising ideas into well-designed solutions that improve user experience, scientific and operational flow, analytical insight, and organizational performance.

This is an end-to-end product leadership role grounded in active engagement with the user community. Accountability extends from opportunity framing and continuous discovery through experience design, prioritization, delivery, rollout, adoption, and benefits realization. A multidisciplinary team will provide deep expertise and execution across design, architecture, engineering, data, integration, change, quality, operations, and external partnerships. The Director will establish direction, integrate these contributions, and sustain momentum until measurable value is realized.

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.

Required Qualifications and Skills:

• 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.

Preferred Skills and Experience:

• 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.

Required Skills:
Asset Management, Benefits Management, Business Continuity, Cybersecurity, Data Integrity, Demand Management, Laboratory Automation, Life Science, Management System Development, Operational Excellence, Patient Safety, Product Lifecycle, Product Management, Regulatory Compliance, Requirements Management, Stakeholder Relationship Management, Strategic Planning, Supply Management, System Designs

Preferred Skills:

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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

US and Puerto Rico Residents Only:

The salary range for this role is
$173,200.00 - $272,600.00

This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, government requirements, and business or organizational needs.

The successful candidate will be eligible for annual bonus and long-term incentive, if applicable.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits. Available benefits include medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family), retirement benefits, including 401(k), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days. More information about benefits is available at https://jobs.merck.com/us/en/compensation-and-benefits.

You can apply for this role through https://jobs.merck.com/us/en (or via the Workday Jobs Hub if you are a current employee). The application deadline for this position is stated on this posting.

San Francisco Residents Only: We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.

Employee Status:
Regular

Relocation:
Domestic

VISA Sponsorship:
No

Travel Requirements:
25%

Flexible Work Arrangements:
Hybrid

Shift:
1st - Day

Valid Driving License:
No

Hazardous Material(s):
n/a

Job Posting End Date: