Director, User Experience Product Line

Roles & Responsibilities

The User Experience Product Line Lead is a core and leadership position in Digital Services, our Digital Manufacuring Division responsible for leading the definition and implementation of User Experience strategy in our Digital Manufacuring Division. The Product Line Lead drives priorities setting and holistic value delivery of the UX capabilities across squads and products in Digital Services. The Product Lead collaborates and partners closely across product teams, our company value and enabling teams, our Manufacturing Operations, and IT CTO with product line UX professionals, UX researchers, UX/UI Designers, product managers, and business stakeholders at all levels to define, implement, maintain, and make innovative improvements to deliver user-centric and outcome-driven products and solutions.

The UX Product Line Lead sets the vision for best-in-class products, anticipating future business capabilities, emerging technologies, designs and best practices, ensuring that vision is realized through implementation and value delivery. This role will lead a product line team to create, scale and maintain our Digital Manufacuring Division UX solutions and capabilities to support digital transformations.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Accountable for Product roadmap (e.g., key capabilities delivered to the business) for designing, building, delivering, and maintaining UX products and technological capability enhancements
• Optimize team setup and delivery models across all functional areas, working with functional leads, while removing roadblocks and impediments, enabling efficient and effective product team delivery
• Translate business goals and end user needs into UX strategy, communicate product priorities to the development team, other matrixed teams, and vendor partners
• Oversee delivery of applications in the products and the on-going operations of cohesive & integrated applications
• Design, develop, and deliver a consistent product line vision, strategy, and roadmap for several products related to Experience Design, UX/UI, User Research, and Technical Product Management relevant to our company user environment.
• Partner with Product teams across our Digital Manufacuring Division and IT to develop, test, and deliver high quality, scalable, and reusable data and digital products
• Oversee Agile Scrum processes for product teams to define and prioritize backlog, create user stories, drive sprint planning and execution, standups, product demos, track velocity, burndown, and deliver retrospectives
• Demonstrated experience in leading strategic design and user-centric research and usability studies, and applying change management approaches to understand user needs and deliver results
• Manage, monitor and calibrate relevant metrics on UX effectiveness
• Demonstrated experience in leading UX designs using a variety of techniques, tools, and best practices to improve product usability, accessibility and desirability
• Lead, develop, upskill, and grow a high-performing and diverse User Experience team
• Set strategy for resource management within systems development, accountable for the allocation of resources for systems development programs, and maintain an overview of the contribution of such program to organizational success. Manage the quality and appropriateness of the work performed and delivers measurable business benefits
• Engage and partner with cross-functional stakeholders (value teams, domain leads, business partners, product owners, etc.) to build project plans and business cases that drive our Manufacuring Division business outcome and value realization while maintaining scalability of UX capabilities
• Ensure senior leaders and business stakeholders are consistently well informed about product strategy, capabilities, priorities, timelines, releases, issues, and risks
• Drive and reinforce highest standards and best practices in technical and operational excellence relevant for user experience
• Accountable for the management and optimization of the product line’s total cost of ownership (TCO)

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Graphics Design, or related field.

Required Experience and Skills:

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience in a delivery lead, team lead, product owner, or product line lead capacity.
• Minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in leading the development and delivery of User Experience, Experience Design, UX Strategy.
• Demonstrated experience in software development lifecycle, agile methodologies e.g. Scrum, and relevant tools such as Jira and Confluence
• Experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing or similar area, building, managing, and leading high-performing, diverse, collaborative and geographically distributed digital product teams
• Solid knowledge and experience in UX capabilities, methodology, and tools to enable User Research, UX/UI Design, and Digital Product capabilities in Manufacturing, Quality, and Supply Chain domains.
• Strong leadership and team building skills and must be able to collaborate effectively with a group of high performing individuals in a fast-paced, agile, dynamic operational environment
• Experience in product and people management with Experience Design, Graphics Design, User Experience, and Data & Digital products knowledge, roadmap, and implementation (e.g., in an organizational unit with 10+ team members)​
• Demonstrated experience owning and delivering digital products​ throughout their entire lifecycle
• Proven ability to facilitate and break down complex product requirements into actionable strategy, implementation plan, and user stories
• Strong leadership skills and the proven ability to drive organizational change​ and alignment, and communicate technical information to senior executives
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills – able to effectively communicate complex concepts in simple ways​
• Active coach and mentor whose goals are to grow, upskill, and maximize the squads’ potential​
• Strong understanding of modern architecture patterns​
• Demonstrated ability to partner with business stakeholders and navigate across conflicting priorities to balance critical tactical and strategic needs ​to achieve business goals and OKRs
• Strategic leader, with demonstrated ability to work in a global, broad, and diverse environment with a fair amount of ambiguity
• Growth and global mindset and ownership mentality with a passion to challenge status quo to find new solutions and drive out of the box ideas

Preferred Experience and Skills:

• MBA or Master’s degree in a relevant field
• Previous experience working in a global environment and transformational change
• Experience with manufacturing shopfloor or lab environments and digital culture is a plus
• Experience with P&L responsibility is a plus

Who we are

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world.

What we look for

Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.

Tell employers what skills you have

Usability
Confluence
Scrum
User Stories
User Experience
Agile
JIRA
User Research
Team Building Skills
Adobe XD
Technical Product Management
Experience Design
UX
Accessibility
Software Development

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