Associate Director, CRM Product Owner

Summary The location for this role is East Hanover, NJ About the Role Novartis is on a mission to transform medicine and improve lives worldwide. As a global leader in healthcare, we leverage advanced technology and data to deliver patient-centric solutions, enhance customer engagement, and drive innovation. The Strategy, Platforms & Transformation team is dedicated to enabling improved decision making at Novartis by leveraging superior data to identify actionable insights that drive enhanced performance. We collaborate closely with the US business, bringing insights and challenging ideas to empower smarter, data-driven decision-making. The US CRM organization sits within Strategy, Platforms & Transformation and plays a crucial role in driving the transformation to a next-generation Customer360 operating model. Novartis seeks an accomplished product management leader with experience and demonstrated success transforming CRM capabilities within commercial operations. Strong innovation, partnership, and intellectual maturity are needed. A comprehensive understanding of best practices in CRM Data and AI applications is key to success in this role. Reporting to CRM Product Management leadership, the Associate Director, CRM Product Owner supports the strategy, development, and delivery of priority CRM capabilities across the US CRM ecosystem. This role partners with business and technology teams to translate customer and field needs into clear requirements, manage a prioritized backlog, and drive execution through agile delivery. The Associate Director helps improve how Novartis engages customers by enabling process improvements, technology enhancements, analytics, and user experience updates—while ensuring solutions meet governance, privacy, and compliance expectations. Major Accountabilities Own and deliver a defined product area: Drive end-to-end delivery for a set of CRM capabilities (e.g., field productivity, customer engagement workflows, medical engagement) from discovery through release and hypercare. Translate business needs into requirements: Partner with stakeholders to gather, document, and prioritize requirements; define user stories, acceptance criteria, and success measures. Manage and refine the backlog: Maintain a healthy backlog (prioritization, refinement cadence, dependencies, definition of ready/done) aligned to quarterly/PI planning and stakeholder priorities. Drive disciplined agile execution: Work with delivery teams to plan, execute, and track work; remove blockers; manage scope trade-offs; and ensure predictable, high-quality releases. Improve processes and user experience: Identify pain points in current workflows and propose enhancements; validate solutions with users; and support change adoption with clear documentation and enablement. Partner across business and IT: Coordinate with CRM product managers, architecture, analytics, privacy/legal, and commercial/medical stakeholders to align on requirements, sequencing, and release readiness. Ensure governance, privacy, and compliance: Follow established governance processes and support risk assessments to ensure solutions meet regulatory, privacy, security, and data standards. Mentor and coordinate delivery resources: Provide day-to-day direction to extended team members (e.g., analysts, contractors) and contribute to capability building across the product owner community. Support change enablement and adoption: Partner with training and communications leads to ensure releases are understood, adopted, and measured; incorporate feedback into iterative improvements. Communicate status and outcomes: Provide concise updates on roadmap items, risks, decisions needed, and measurable outcomes to product management leadership and stakeholders. Contribute to product strategy and continuous improvement: Bring market/industry insights, user feedback, and performance data to inform roadmap recommendations and operational improvements. Maintain platform and domain awareness: Stay current on CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Veeva) and evolving best practices; apply learnings pragmatically within the Novartis ecosystem. Essential Requirements Bachelor's degree in related field is required; Master of Science and/or MBA preferred Proven success in driving product management capabilities for large-scale CRM implementations. 5-7+ years of experience in product management, technology strategy, innovation, or leadership roles, preferably in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, or