Apollo Platform Product Director

For 75 years, Charles River employees have worked together to assist in the discovery, development and safe manufacture of new drug therapies. When you join our family, you will have a significant impact on the health and well-being of people across the globe. Whether your background is in life sciences, finance, IT, sales or another area, your skills will play an important role in the work we perform. In return, we’ll help you build a career that you can feel passionate about.

Job Summary

An advocate for Agile mindsets, behaviors and processes, the Apollo Platform Product Director role is an essential leader of multiple cross-functional teams within the Digital Journey and across Digital Operations. The primary goal of a Product Director is to represent the internal and external customers to the development teams. A key activity is to lead both innovations supporting the Agile teams and future product development that impacts the customer experience within and outside of CRL. The Product Director oversees strategy and roadmap across Apollo Platform Common Services, APIM, Identity, Documents, Design Systems, and other shared technology platforms as needed. Product Directors direct key information and strategic decision making, deliver customer-driven features, manage customer-feedback, roadmap prioritization and communicates to those in the team as necessary for managing the product backlog, or the prioritized list of requirements for future product development.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Lead the Apollo technology core platform teams
• Serve as the voice of the internal and external customer for activities and interactions across the customer journey as supported within current and future state of Apollo
• Provide vision and direction to the Agile development team(s) and stakeholders throughout the project and create requirements. 
• Champion the work of the team, advocate for value-focused, timely, and high-quality delivery, reward and recognize teammates and peers for their contributions.
• Plan, manage and prioritize the product backlog items and development for the product based on customer desirability, value to the business, data availability/quality, technical feasibility, risks, and dependencies.
• Define and refine product vision, goals, metrics, and business case(s) to meet value capture, revenue, and OI impact. 
• Establish and communicate short and long term road-map and growth opportunities for platform scale, expansion, and support of multiple user journeys through common technology. 
• Achieve increment and sprint planning through established and clear goals that are aligned with user/business needs and are aligned with the Product strategy across multiple product delivery teams.
• Work closely with Technical Directors to ensure platform scalability, impact, and developer experience. 
• Manage product owners (5) responsible for individual areas of the platform product delivery and backlog, ensure well-coordinated delivery across full Apollo platform team. 
• Coach product owner team in Agile/Scrum best practices and new trends.
• Work with internal and external customers to identify and analyze their needs, identify challenges or pain points, help them mitigate risk and accelerate their workflows.
• Possess a fundamental understanding of end-to-end internal and external customer journey focused on combined and seamless log-in experiences across multiple digital touchpoints
• Represent team in front of stakeholders, clients or users.
• Provide coaching, feedback, direction, and guidance to POs supporting Apollo Platform delivery teams including Common Services, IAM, APIM, OutSystems, Documents. 
• Responsible for personnel management activities such as: scheduling, personnel actions (hiring, promotions, transfers, etc.) . training and development, providing regular direction and feedback on performance, disciplinary actions and preparing and delivering annual performance and salary reviews. 

Job Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in biological science, computer science or related field.
• Experience: 10 years of related experience, including in various disciplines within SaaS or other product delivery experience. Understanding and experience in agile methodologies and frameworks. Proficiency in coaching and mentoring. Experience with (organizational) change management. Experience with enterprise technologies. Demonstrated knowledge and experience building, consuming, and supporting APIs.
• 3 years of experience building, managing and directing teams
• An equivalent combination of education and experience may be accepted as a satisfactory substitute for the specific education and experience listed above
• Certification/Licensure: None
• Other: Strong communication and leadership skills with ability to align the organization on complex technical and process-driven decisions and practices. Active coach and mentor whose goals are to grow and maximize the team’s potential. Visible passion for subject area, participation in domain activities and groups, ability to organize related events. Openness to new ideas and desire to develop them together. Strong cross functional communication, partnership, openness, and embracing of transparency with internal teams and business stakeholders. Self-awareness of cognitive biases and potential impact on decision making. Focused on building high performing teams, developing team members and delivering outcomes that matter to organization.

Compensation Data

The pay range for this position is $160K - $220K USD. Please note that salaries vary within the range based on factors including, but not limited to, experience, skills, education, certifications, and location.

About Corporate Functions 
The Corporate Functions provide operational support across Charles River in areas such as Human Resources, Finance, IT, Legal, Sales, Quality Assurance, Marketing, and Corporate Development. They partner with their colleagues across the company to develop and drive strategies and to set global standards. The functions are essential to providing a bridge between strategic vision and operational readiness, to ensure ongoing functional innovation and capability improvement.

About Charles River
Charles River is an early-stage contract research organization (CRO). We have built upon our foundation of laboratory animal medicine and science to develop a diverse portfolio of discovery and safety assessment services, both Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) and non-GLP, to support clients from target identification through preclinical development. Charles River also provides a suite of products and services to support our clients’ clinical laboratory testing needs and manufacturing activities. Utilizing this broad portfolio of products and services enables our clients to create a more flexible drug development model, which reduces their costs, enhances their productivity and effectiveness to increase speed to market.

With over 20,000 employees within 110 facilities in over 20 countries around the globe, we are strategically positioned to coordinate worldwide resources and apply multidisciplinary perspectives in resolving our client’s unique challenges. Our client base includes global pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, government agencies and hospitals and academic institutions around the world. 

At Charles River, we are passionate about our role in improving the quality of people’s lives. Our mission, our excellent science and our strong sense of purpose guide us in all that we do, and we approach each day with the knowledge that our work helps to improve the health and well-being of many across the globe. We have proudly supported the development of 86% of the drugs approved by the FDA in 2021.