Organization OverviewLilly Catalyze360 is a comprehensive approach to enabling the early-stage biotech ecosystem by democratizing access to infrastructure, expertise, and resources. Through its interconnected pillars - Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, Lilly ExploR&D, and Lilly TuneLab - Catalyze360 strategically removes barriers that traditionally block bold science from becoming life-changing medicines, providing biotechs with flexible combinations of capital, physical lab space, R&D capabilities, AI/ML tools, and decades of enterprise learning.
Catalyze360 is building products for early-stage biotechs so that a small team can operate with the capabilities of a scaled organization at a fraction of the headcount. Our focus is the operational work that runs alongside the science, where the workflows today are manual, fragmented, or often missing entirely. At a small biotech, that work often lands on two or three people who are also leading the research.
Job SummaryToday this expertise reaches biotechs one company at a time through Lilly's own scientists. The work is to partner with them and turn what they know into products that scale. A biotech should get most of the way on its own and reach an expert at the point where that's what it actually needs.
We're hiring a Staff Product Manager to own this area. It's an individual contributor role. You set the direction for your area, you decide what the first release leaves out, and you answer for whether it worked. You'll join with products already in flight and a roadmap in place, and we expect you to challenge both.
The biggest risk here isn't building too slowly. It's building the wrong thing. We would rather spend an extra two weeks on the problem than a quarter on the wrong answer. When something isn't working, you should be comfortable being the one who says so.
You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering, design, data science, and drug developers along the way.
Key ResponsibilitiesPick the problems worth solving- Live close to the users of your product. Learn how the work actually gets done and where it stalls.
- Run lightweight discovery: interviews, prototypes, working sessions. Test what's worth building before engineering commits.
- Decide which problems we take on next, and make the case for the order.
- Come out of discovery with a direction the team can build against, not just a summary of what you heard.
Own the product- Own the area end to end: strategy, scope, roadmap, launch, and the messy period after.
- Stay hands-on. The strategy, the specs, and the analysis are yours to write, not to review.
- Communicate so decisions stick. Engineering, leadership, and end users should each be able to read what you wrote and reach the same conclusion.
- Make the scope calls, including the unpopular ones about what the first release leaves out.
- Decide what success looks like before you ship, and make sure we're instrumented well enough to know either way.
Lift the team- Mentor product managers and product-adjacent peers as the team grows. Make them better at the job, not just better at this product.
- Partner with engineering and design on hiring. You sell the role and you hold the bar.
- Set how the team works: how discovery runs, how specs get written, how calls get made.
- Partner with engineering and design on the plan, and negotiate scope in the open. You'll push on their estimates and they'll push on your priorities.
Operate effectively inside a large company- Navigate enterprise infrastructure, security, privacy, and compliance requirements without disrupting development progress.
- Get Lilly's R&D experts into the product itself. Much of what makes these tools worth anything lives only in people's heads.
- Represent the product with end users. You can speak credibly to technical and scientific stakeholders.
Minimum Requirements- Education: Bachelor's degree.
- 8+ years of product management experience, with a track record of shipping software that end users rely on.
Additional Skills/PreferencesProduct craft- Demonstrated experience operating as a senior or staff product manager on a small team, not just as a senior PM on a large one.
- Experience taking a product from zero to one, where the users, the product, and the strategy all had to be worked out at once.
- You take a fuzzy problem from research to scope to shipped product without losing the thread.
- You know how to find the real problem. You're as comfortable running a customer interview as a roadmap review.
- You ask "what problem are we solving?" before "what should we build?"
- You pull your own data. SQL or something like it, enough to define a metric or size a market without waiting on an analyst.
Technical depth- Enough familiarity with AI/ML to make good product decisions. You don't need to be a data scientist, but you need to understand what the models can and can't do.
- Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features. You understand the practical challenges: reliability, evals, context management, and when not to use AI.
- You can hold your own with engineers on architecture and tradeoffs, and you prototype with AI tools when that's faster than arguing in the abstract.
Startup mentality- You've worked in environments where the roadmap wasn't fully defined and the team was small, and you thrived.
- Self-sufficient. You unblock yourself and figure things out.
- You take ownership broadly. If something isn't working, you fix it rather than wait for someone else to.
- Startup experience matters here more than big-tech tenure.
How you lead- You lead with judgment. You don't need a senior title to set direction.
- Low ego, high standards. You'll learn from someone who knows the area better, and you'll push back firmly when you don't agree.
Additional Experience- Experience in life sciences, pharma, biotech, or health tech, especially building for scientists or R&D teams.
- Background building B2B SaaS or platform products.
- Experience shipping into regulated environments, and some familiarity with what that does to data governance and timelines.
Why This Role- Lilly has 150 years of drug development experience and the data underneath it. The gap is product: turning that into something a small biotech can pick up and use. You'd own a product outright, with a short decision chain and direct access to the experts whose knowledge goes into it, and what you ship can affect how medicines get discovered and developed.
Additional Information- Lilly may provide support for or sponsor work authorization or visas for this role for internal applicants only.
Actual compensation will depend on a candidate's education, experience, skills, and geographic location. The anticipated wage for this position is
$180,000 - $275,000
Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly's compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.
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