Senior Manager - Product Management & Customer Success Lead

Job Title: Senior Manager - Product Management & Customer Success Lead

Career Level - E

The Product Management & Customer Success Lead (Senior Manager) role exists to:be our customers’ primary point of contact across multiple product development projects, andprovide inspiration and product management coaching support to our team of Product Owners / Customer

Engagement Associates

This role typically develops 2-4 products/ services simultaneously, with commensurate scopes. (Typical product scopes/ technologies range from Power BI dashboards through to machine-learning-powered web-based platforms)

The ideal candidate is naturally inquisitive about their customers’ professional lives and the decisions they have to take. This includes wanting to build a rich understanding of AZ’s functions (e.g. R&D, Commercial, Operations and others)

Just like the (less senior) Product Owners / Customer Engagement Associates in the team, the ideal candidate:

… is obsessive about customer satisfaction and building great products, but is also pragmatic in making product-feature trade-offs to deliver value as quickly / “early” as possible to customers. (E.g. through Agile delivery); and

… can “talk tech” with Engineers, “talk design” with UX Designers, and “talk data science” with Data Scientists, but leaves implementation choices to the relevant teammates, supporting the Product Owner in providing only “healthy challenge” on the customer’s behalf

However, this Product Management & Customer Success Lead (Senior Manager) role-holder knows how to achieve these outcomes through the cross-functional (scrum) delivery teams.

Accountabilities

From initial customer introductions set-up and supported by the Customer Lead, elicit and co-create high-value digital (analytics) product definitions with customers, where those products maximise the effectiveness of AZ decision-making

Maintain and build on existing customer relationships in a typical “account management” capacity, aiming for “trusted (analytics) advisor” status in customers’ minds.

Provide “go to” coaching support on both customer engagement and product management to less senior members of the team

Build a broad and deep internal network of AZ colleagues who can help our teams unblock obstacles to product success

Work with our internal Resource Allocation team to ensure all our projects are well-staffed: they deliver on-time and on-budget, whilst protecting the team from “unreasonable” customer expectations

Contribute to the development of the GBS Analytics value-proposition – e.g. via “sales and marketing” activities, and by maintaining awareness of external (non-AZ) best practices and insights

Essential skills

Customer relationship and account management. E.g. empathising, building trust, and mutual-respect

Product Management as part of a Scrum team / Scrum-of-Scrums. E.g. roadmap development, high-level business-case planning, user-journey mapping; BDD user-story writing, process-mapping, facilitation, problem-solving; etc.

Clear and effective communication (written, visual and verbal)

Data literacy. E.g. understanding of how large organisations typically use data in their business processes; understanding of data structures (“relational” vs. “graph”; “master” vs. “transactional”; “fact” vs. “dimension”; etc.); understanding of common patterns and approaches in using data to make decisions (e.g. statistical “significance”, awareness of information-security considerations, etc.)

Ability to grasp technical and organisational concepts rapidly, without needing to build deep expertise in them. E.g. why a team function exists, without needing to perform that function

Appreciation for visual design and information architecture. E.g. why/ when certain interface components would be better/ worse choices than others; the ability to compare design choices against users’ stated needs, goals and processes

Desirable knowledge/ skills

Understanding/ experience of:

software development, its best-practices (inc. DevOps/ DevSecOps/ ML Ops, etc.) and relevant technologies (e.g. data stores and analytics tools)

coaching others

machine-learning algorithms and techniques

drug development and the pharmaceutical industry

working in a highly-regulated industry

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.