Associate Director, Product Management

Merck Gruppe - MSD Sharp & Dohme; Hyderabad; Hybrid; INR 25,00,000 - 35,00,000; Full time

Job summary

A global healthcare biopharma company in Hyderabad seeks an Associate Director, Product Management, to lead product strategy for digital products supporting logistics. Candidates should have significant product management experience and strong data analytics skills. The role involves defining product vision, managing stakeholder relationships, and ensuring successful product delivery.

Qualifications

• 10+ years product management or related experience for senior roles; 3+ years for mid-level roles.
• Demonstrated delivery of complex, cross-functional products in enterprise environments.
• Strong data & analytics skills: 1–3 years delivering reporting solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the product throughout its lifecycle from discovery to retirement.
• Define product vision, strategy, and roadmap with a focus on value and user experience.
• Maintain and prioritize the product backlog to maximize value delivery.

Skills

Product Management

Product Design & Strategy

Stakeholder Relationship Management

Requirements Definition & Management

Systems Development Management

Technical fluency

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field

Tools

SAP S/4HANA

Power BI

Atlassian tools such as Confluence and Jira

Job description

Overview

Associate Director, Product Management – Role based in Hyderabad within a global healthcare biopharma company with a 130-year legacy of success, backed by ethical integrity and a mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare.

The organization is driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches supporting a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products. This role focuses on innovation and execution excellence through data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making; the team builds custom software to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.

Our Technology centers create a space where teams deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. Tech centers are globally distributed and essential to supporting our business and strategy, with leaders focused on growth, success, well-being, and a sense of belonging while managing critical emergencies. We collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across Tech Centers.

The Opportunity

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 lifecycle, translating stakeholder needs into measurable outcomes, defining strategy and roadmaps, and partnering with technical SMEs to deliver high-value, sustainable solutions.

Role Overview

You will own and evolve the product throughout its lifecycle—from discovery and build to release, adoption, support, and retirement. You will define the overall product vision, strategy and roadmap with a relentless focus on value, business outcomes, and user experience. You will make and defend product decisions that align to strategy and stakeholder needs, acting as the single source of product priorities. You will lead continuous product discovery to understand user and stakeholder needs, translate insights into solutions, and maintain an actionable product backlog. You will create, maintain, and prioritize the product backlog to maximize value delivery and long-term sustainability. You will define guidelines for developing business cases for complex products and review them to ensure needs, risks, and value-add are captured. You will assess alignment between requirements, proposed solutions, and outcomes, mitigating gaps through design, engineering, or process changes. You will develop and calibrate product metrics and KPIs to measure value, adoption, retention, user experience, and operational cost. You will drive release planning, go-to-market activities, support planning, and post-release monitoring; ensure squads are prepared to deliver and support releases. You will connect delivery squads with customers and facilitate direct communication between end users, stakeholders, and engineering teams. You will monitor and optimize the product’s total cost of ownership (TCO), including operational and support costs. You will lead stakeholder relationship management across business, IT, and Venders; negotiate trade-offs and manage expectations. You may 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.
• Demonstrated delivery of complex, cross-functional products in enterprise environments.
• 3–5 years of deep functional experience or hands-on experience on ERP systems implementation projects 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 Power BI, ThoughtSpot, or similar; familiarity with R or RStudio is a plus.
• Experience defining business cases and benefits realization for complex, multi-stakeholder programs.
• Familiarity with SDLC and/or Agile methodologies and working with delivery squads.
• Hands-on experience with Atlassian tools like Confluence and Jira is a plus.

Required Skills & Capabilities

• Product Management: Proven experience owning and shipping products end-to-end; experience 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 guiding engineering teams through delivery lifecycles.
• Systems Design: Ability to contribute to system and solution design discussions with technical SMEs.
• Benefits Management: Ability 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; able to read architectural diagrams and engage in technical trade-offs 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 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 Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. We have been inventing for life for more than a century, delivering medicines and vaccines to address global health challenges. Today, we remain at the forefront of research to provide innovative health solutions and advance prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals worldwide.

What we look for

Imagine a role where you can help save and improve lives around the world. Bring empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific expertise to collaborate with a diverse team pursuing hope for people battling challenging diseases. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are intellectually curious, join us and start making an impact today.

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Employee Status: Regular

Relocation: n/a

VISA Sponsorship: n/a

Travel Requirements: n/a

Flexible Work Arrangements: Hybrid

Shift: n/a

Valid Driving License: n/a

Hazardous Material(s): n/a

Job Posting End Date: 10/24/2025

A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFORE the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply no later than the day BEFORE the end date.

Requisition ID: R368117