About the Role

The Director, Product Strategy & Operations operates as a leader within the product organization to drive operating model and management mechanisms across Pharmacy Management, Clinical Service and Inventory Optimization technology products.

This leader is the operating-model owner, not roadmap owner; establishing the cadences, frameworks, tools, workflows, and metrics that make product development consistent and constantly improving. Partnering with the Product Leadership on enablement, product hygiene, training, sharing of best practices, and maturing product management craft for the team.

Reporting to the VP of Product, this leader runs the management mechanisms by which the product organization makes investment decisions, plans and commits to delivery, measures outcomes, scans and adapts to the market. This leader drive transparency in the tracking of the performance of our products and business objectives.

This strategic role works closely with Product Leadership, Engineering, Customer Success, Commercial teams, and Strategic Insights and other McKesson organizations to facilitate seamless integration with our strategic objectives, drive operational efficiency and support business growth.

McKesson Pharmacy System (MPS) is an independent business within the larger McKesson Commercial Strategy & Innovation (CSI) organization.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy Development

In partnership with other orgs, drive the definition and refinement of the multi-year product and innovation strategy across the product portfolio.

• Integrate market trends, competitive landscapes, customer needs, and adjacent innovations to identify high-value opportunities. Translate strategic themes into actionable product recommendations that can be leveraged by the product leaders.
• Own the operating cadence for updating of product vision, strategy, and GTM approach.
• Maintain the connection from vision and strategy upstream through the 12–18-month roadmap and PI quarterly planning downstream; ensure major roadmap decisions trace back to strategic intent.

Cross-Functional Planning, Resourcing & Integration

Serve as a strategic connector across the product and design teams, fostering alignment with engineering, data insights, marketing, sales, customer success and compliance functions.

• Ensure emerging strategic efforts are integrated into roadmaps, portfolio planning, and annual operating cycles.
• Own cross-team capacity and dependency planning coordination; surface un-resourced commitments and replanning triggers early; ensure Product, Engineering, and other partner org roles are aligned on the critical path.
• Coordinate cross-product GTM cadence (release planning, launch readiness, product marketing, and sales enablement), ensuring launches do not conflict and commercial milestones align with delivery milestones.
• Own the release calendar and coordinate release timing across all product areas to avoid collisions and align customer-facing communication; integrate with Sales, Customer Success, Support, and Marketing readiness.

Product Operating Model Maturity

Own the definition and execution of the product model transformation by defining refining activities, tools, processes, data/metrics, and continuous improvement. Serve as the evangelist for product and delivery excellence, cross-functional collaboration, and innovation best practices.

• Own the prioritization framework methodology, scoring, and calibration cadence across product areas; ensure prioritized decisions are explainable, defensible and measurable.
• Own product tooling administration (across strategy, discovery, planning, design, testing, measurement); including standards and templates to ensure the toolchain reinforces rather than fragments the operating model.
• Own PM training, onboarding and enablement; coach PMs on prioritization, ROI sizing, experimentation, and planning craft.
• Influence streamlining and integration with delivery & support model with engineering and customer success orgs

Product Operations Mechanisms

Design, run, and continuously improve the operating mechanisms by which the product organization plans, decides, and delivers.

• Design and run the PI / quarterly planning ritual end-to-end; manage pre-read templates, coach planning quality, track commitment hit rate per cycle, and drive improvements from retrospectives.
• Own the 12–18-month roadmap operating discipline refresh cadence, change-control mechanism, stakeholder views, and integration with OKR tooling and customer-facing release notes.
• Define the functionality lifecycle review framework (enhance / maintain / sunset) to help manage product complexity; each Product Director will own their reviews.
• Maintain judgment on where to standardize versus where to allow team-level variation; institutionalize practices through adoption and instrumentation rather than imposing bureaucracy.

Product Performance Tracking

Partner with Product Managers to define and track performance for improving customer experience and product growth, across product lines.

• Own the standard for how product health is defined and reported: the canonical KPI taxonomy to ensure performance signal is comparable across products without forcing false uniformity on products with different business models.
• Own the product performance dashboard infrastructure across and partner with Platform and Engineering teams on the underlying instrumentation, access and visualization.
• Own the product performance review cadence and templates: the standard rhythm by which PMs report on their product's health to the Leadership; ensure reviews are evidence-based and decision-oriented rather than status updates.
• Surface early-warning signals in product performance to Product, Engineering and Customer Success leadership, and run the escalation protocol that gets the right team members involved to mitigate issues.
• Synthesize product performance data into actionable insights, so that reallocation, sunset, and acceleration calls are grounded in observed performance rather than narrative alone.

Portfolio Insights & Strategic Reporting

Partner with Product Leadership and CSI Leadership highlighting opportunities for optimization or investment shifts and alignment to enterprise value drivers. Leverage analytics, VOC, and market analysis to inform recommendations and drive continuous improvements in strategic planning.

• Own and curate portfolio-level metric definition and governance in partnership with CSI leadership.
• Own the portfolio review cadence and tracking of KPIs and support roll up to broader portfolio reviews.
• Partner with Customer Success and other teams on the feedback taxonomy, routing, and close-the-loop discipline; regularly surface rising themes across in-product, support, and survey channels to leadership.
• Coordinate with Sales to report on the win/loss patterns by segment, deal size, and competitor.
• Synthesize the competitive monitoring materials into useful and refreshable artifacts to GM and product leaders and integrate them into leadership updates

Product Operations Team Leadership

Build, lead, manage, and develop the Product Strategy & Operations function.

• Set the staffing plan and ramp for the Product Operations function in partnership with VP Product and HR
• Hire, develop, and retain a high-leverage analyst team; set priorities, coach craft, and adjudicate capacity conflicts across the operating-mechanism portfolio.
• Partner with senior leaders without holding line authority over their teams; secure VP Product backing visibly enough that cross-cluster process compliance is sustained.

Basic Requirements (Minimum Qualifications)

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Business, Analytics, or related field AND typically 10+ years of relevant experience in product management, strategy, or technology leadership
• Experience with designing and running operating mechanisms and demonstrably improving them over time and collaborating across technical and business teams, ideally within a digitally oriented or product-driven environment.
• Ability to design and optimize process and exercise judgment on where to standardize versus where to allow cluster-level variation to ensure repeatable speed.
• Experience operating cross-pillar product processes where commercial accountability is distributed across multiple product lines, buyer personas, and GTM motions.
• Strong cross-functional facilitation and collaboration: able to convene product, engineering, design, customer success and commercial leaders, to steer conversations, surface issues / decisions, document outcomes, and drive accountability.
• Demonstrated ownership of one or more of: portfolio management cadence, PI / quarterly planning ritual, prioritization framework, ROI gate, or governance across a multi-team product organization.
• Analytical and financial fluency governing metric definitions, challenge measurement rigor, and extract insights from data within context (without owning the analytics platform).
• Communication and synthesis ability to produce executive-grade materials and reporting that informs and influences leadership decisions.
• Track record building and managing small high-performance teams and partnering with senior leaders without holding line authority over their teams.
• Familiarity with building AI tools and workflows to accelerate product development velocity.

Preferred Skills / Experience

• Advanced degree (MBA, MS in business strategy, innovation, analytics, or related).
• Experience designing operating mechanisms for multi-product platform organizations where the operating model itself is a transformation deliverable.
• Familiarity with technical product concepts, cloud platforms, data ecosystems, and API-driven models is beneficial.
• Experience in healthcare, pharmacy operations, supply chain, or predictive analytics domains.

Working Conditions

Traditional office or hybrid environment, depending on location. Some travel required for cross-site collaboration and customer/partner engagements.