Associate Director, Product Management

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Associate Director, Product Management

The Opportunity

• Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare.
• Be part of an organisation driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products.
• Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.

Our Technology centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of the company IT operating model, Tech centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy.

A focused group of leaders in each tech center helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers.

Role Overview:

Seeking a Technical Product Manager with strong product design and strategy capabilities to own and evolve complex digital products and systems that support distribution, logistics, and cold-chain operations. You will be the product expert across the entire lifecycle, translating stakeholder needs into measurable outcomes, defining strategy and roadmaps, and partnering closely with technical SMEs (Information Architecture, Software Engineering) to deliver high value, sustainable solutions.

Why this role matters

You will ensure our product delivers clear business outcomes and an exceptional user experience while optimizing total cost of ownership. Your strategic thinking and technical fluency will guide business case development, alignment of requirements to outcomes, and long-term product evolution.

What will you do in this role:

Own and manage the product throughout its entire lifecycle—from discovery and build to release, adoption, support, and retirement.

Define and communicate the overall product vision, strategy and roadmap with a relentless focus on value, business outcomes, and user experience.

Make and defend product decisions that align to strategy and stakeholder needs, act as the single source of product priorities.

Lead continuous product discovery to deeply understand user and stakeholder needs, translate insights into solutions, and maintain an actionable product backlog.

Create, maintain, and continuously prioritize the product backlog to maximize value delivery and long-term sustainability.

Define guidelines for developing comprehensive business cases for complex products, systems, and software; review and validate business cases to ensure they capture needs, risks, and value-add.

Assess and ensure alignment between requirements, proposed solutions, and expected outcomes; mitigate gaps through design, engineering, or process changes.

Develop and regularly calibrate product metrics and KPIs to measure value, adoption, retention, user experience, and operational cost.

Drive release planning, go-to-market activities, support planning, and post-release monitoring; ensure squads are prepared to deliver and support releases.

Connect delivery squads with customers; facilitate direct communication between end users, stakeholders, and engineering teams.

Monitor and optimize the product’s total cost of ownership (TCO), including operational and support costs.

Lead stakeholder relationship management across business, IT, and third-party vendors; negotiate trade-offs and manage expectations.

Mentor or operate in roles such as Feature Manager, Scientific Product Owner, or D&A Discovery Consultant when required.

What Should you have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Logistics, or related field; advanced degree preferred but not required.
• 10+ years product management or related experience for senior roles; 3+ years for mid-level roles (adjust based on hiring needs).
• Demonstrated delivery of complex, cross-functional products in enterprise environments.
• 3–5 years of deep functional experience or hands-on experience on systems implementation projects delivering ERP solutions in distribution and logistics, transportation, or cold chain management.
• Functional knowledge of SAP S/4HANA or ECC, Blue Yonder Transportation Management, and IoT-enabled cold chain monitoring platforms is a strong plus.
• Experience with freight rate or freight bill audit platforms is advantageous.
• Strong data & analytics skills: 1–3 years delivering reporting solutions using Microsoft Power BI, ThoughtSpot, or similar. Familiarity with statistical computing/graphics tools (R, RStudio) is also a plus.
• Experience defining business cases and benefits realization for complex, multi-stakeholder programs.
• Familiarity with Systems Data Life Cycle (SDLC) and/or Agile delivery methodologies and models and experience working with squads/delivery teams.
• Hands on experience with Atlassian Tools like Confluence and Jira is also a plus.

Required Skills & Capabilities

• Product Management: Proven experience owning and shipping products or large features end-to-end. Experience working with transportation invoicing and auditing is a plus.
• Product Design & Strategy: Strong design thinking and strategic planning skills; ability to translate vision into roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
• Stakeholder Relationship Management: Strong communicator and collaborator; experience managing cross-functional stakeholders.
• Requirements Definition & Management: Skilled at eliciting, documenting, and prioritizing requirements for complex systems.
• Systems Development Management: Experience working with engineering teams through systems or software delivery lifecycles.
• Systems Design: Ability to contribute to system and solution design discussions with technical SMEs.
• Benefits Management: Able to quantify and validate business value, ROI, and benefits realization.
• Asset Management: Understanding of asset lifecycles and operational considerations where applicable.
• Technical fluency: Comfortable in a digital environment; can read architectural diagrams, engage in technical trade-offs, and work with information architects and software engineers.

What Success Looks Like after 8 months on the Job

• A clear, communicated product vision and prioritized roadmap aligned to stakeholder needs and business objectives.
• Validated business cases for upcoming major initiatives with measurable benefits and acceptance criteria.
• An actively managed and prioritized backlog with ongoing discovery cadence and demonstrable user insights driving priorities.
• Baseline product metrics established and early improvements in adoption, satisfaction, or cost metrics.
• Strong working relationships between product, technical SMEs, and delivery squads with smooth release and support handoffs.

Our technology teams operate as business partners, proposing ideas and innovative solutions that enable new organizational capabilities. We collaborate internationally to deliver services and solutions that help everyone be more productive and enable innovation.

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.

#HYDIT2025

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.

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Requisition ID:R368117