Instrumentation R&D: Operational Excellence Lead

Alcon; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Alcon is seeking an Operational Excellence Leader to strengthen organizational health and accelerate performance across processes, product development, and culture. This on-site role in Lake Forest, CA focuses on transparent data, accountable governance, and scalable improvements that boost speed, quality, and employee effectiveness.

You will partner with leaders to translate insights into prioritized actions, strengthen ways of working, and build capabilities across the global organization,

Responsibilities

• Establish an organizational-health framework that provides insight into operating effectiveness, role and decision clarity, collaboration, change readiness, leadership follow-through, and employee enablement.
• Combine performance data, employee listening, stakeholder feedback, and operating observations to identify systemic barriers affecting execution and organizational effectiveness.
• Partner with leaders to translate organizational health insights into prioritized interventions with clear ownership, milestones, adoption measures, and expected outcomes.
• Strengthen ways of working through clear decision rights, effective governance, disciplined escalation, simplified interfaces, and visible accountability.
• Build a culture in which teams surface problems early, resolve root causes using evidence, share learning, and sustain improvements without reliance on heroic effort.
• Establish and maintain a product development excellence framework covering principles, standard practices, decision criteria, measures, and governance across the development lifecycle.
• Map end-to-end workflows and identify bottlenecks, rework, delays, avoidable handoffs, duplicative activity, and other sources of friction.
• Lead Lean and structured problem-solving initiatives that improve flow, shorten feedback loops, simplify work, and increase reuse without compromising quality, safety, or regulatory requirements.
• Identify and prioritize Operational Excellence initiatives based on strategic value, product development impact, feasibility, organizational readiness, and measurable benefit.
• Evaluate automation, analytics, digital tools, modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that can accelerate learning, increase capacity, improve quality, and strengthen decisions.
• Pilot improvements, validate results, capture lessons learned, and scale successful practices across the global organization.
• Create an integrated view of development performance, including flow, decision latency, milestone predictability, quality, risk retirement, reuse, and launch readiness.
• Identify recurring issues across products and platforms, distinguish local execution challenges from systemic constraints, and lead cross-organizational solutions where shared intervention creates value.
• Partner with product, technical, quality, operations, and launch-readiness leaders to improve development outcomes while preserving their respective accountabilities.
• Ensure improvement priorities tied to measurable effects on product outcomes, organizational capacity, employee experience, strategic capability, and sustainable value.
• Identify, validate, document, and scale effective practices across engineering disciplines, functions, sites, product teams, and relevant external benchmarks.
• Translate proven improvements into practical standards, playbooks, templates, toolkits, training, and adoption mechanisms, allowing justified variation based on product, technology, risk, and regulatory needs.
• Coach leaders and teams in Lean, structured problem solving, change leadership, and continuous-improvement methods.
• Build internal capability so leaders and teams can identify, implement, and sustain improvements as part of everyday work.
• Establish a balanced performance-management system covering organizational health, process effectiveness, product development performance, adoption, capabilities, and realized value.
• Develop dashboards and operating reviews that support fact-based decisions, visible accountability, timely corrective action, and organizational learning.
• Define business cases and success measures for improvement initiatives and track delivery from diagnostic through implementation and sustainment.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews to verify

Job description

Alcon is seeking an Operational Excellence Leader to strengthen organizational health and accelerate performance across processes, product development, and culture. This on-site role in Lake Forest, CA focuses on transparent data, accountable governance, and scalable improvements that boost speed, quality, and employee effectiveness.

You will partner with leaders to translate insights into prioritized actions, strengthen ways of working, and build capabilities across the global organization,