Lead Product Manager

Job Description

As Lead Product Manager, you will lead and own the R&D Activity Product-Oriented Delivery (POD) within CP R&D IT. You will be accountable for a portfolio of digital products that enable R&D innovation across both laboratory and field environments.

You will shape the POD vision and multi-horizon roadmap, make prioritisation and investment decisions, define clear product boundaries, and drive measurable improvements in how R&D captures, manages, and uses data—from laboratory experimentation and assay workflows to field trials, sensors, imaging, and geospatial data.

This is a senior product leadership role. You will lead a cross-functional team and may line-manage and develop Product Managers within the POD, ensuring scalable, sustainable, secure, and high-quality digital products with clear business outcomes.

Key responsibilities

• Co-create the POD vision, value hypotheses, and multi-horizon product roadmap with business and technical stakeholders.
• Translate strategy into a coherent product portfolio aligned with business priorities, investment decisions, and enterprise architecture.
• Define product boundaries, ownership, taxonomy, interfaces, and dependencies across PODs.
• Establish and track POD-level success measures, including OKRs, KPIs, adoption, user outcomes, operational performance, value realisation, and total cost of ownership.
• Act as the senior voice of the customer, ensuring enterprise and user needs are understood, validated, and reflected in product direction.
• Lead stakeholder engagement across R&D, business, IT, data, security, architecture, quality, and compliance functions.
• Own product delivery governance, prioritisation cadence, backlog health, release planning, capacity allocation, and management of scope, time, cost, and value trade-offs.
• Drive operational excellence through reliable product operations, incident and problem management, root-cause analysis, and post-launch value tracking.
• Manage POD-level risks, dependencies, data governance, security, regulatory constraints, and vendor or partner relationships.
• Ensure data solutions align with FAIR principles, data quality, traceability, provenance, auditability, metadata, and standardisation requirements.
• Partner with technical leads and architects to deliver scalable, reusable, secure, and enterprise-aligned solutions.
• Monitor relevant market trends and emerging technologies across lab and field R&D, including LIMS/ELN, lab automation, instrument connectivity, mobile/offline solutions, IoT and sensors, geospatial/GIS, imaging, and digital phenotyping.
• Lead, coach, and develop Product Managers, strengthening product practice and delivery capability across the POD.
• Manage POD budget allocation, resource planning, and financial performance, ensuring optimal return on investment and cost-effective delivery of digital solutions.
• Establish regular stakeholder communication cadences and reporting mechanisms to maintain transparency on product progress, risks, and business impact across the organisation.
• Leverage product analytics and data-driven insights to inform prioritisation decisions, validate product hypotheses, and continuously optimise user experience and business outcomes.

Qualifications

**Required:**

• Demonstrated experience leading product-centric, cross-functional teams and delivering measurable outcomes through Agile and Lean product practices.
• Strong product strategy skills, including vision setting, roadmap development, prioritisation, portfolio management, and value measurement through OKRs/KPIs.
• Experience managing complex digital product portfolios in enterprise environments.
• Understanding of digital R&D workflows in laboratory and/or field environments, including data capture, experimentation, trial execution, automation, sensors, imaging, geospatial data, and data standards.
• Knowledge of data integrity, discoverability, metadata, taxonomy/ontology, traceability, provenance, auditability, and quality controls across data pipelines.
• Experience working with data governance, security, architecture, quality, compliance, and regulatory requirements.
• Strong stakeholder management and change leadership skills, with the ability to influence without formal authority.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, make sound trade-offs, and communicate effectively with business and technical leaders.
• Strategic and systems-thinking mindset, with the ability to simplify complex challenges whilst maintaining end-to-end design integrity.
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in IT, Engineering, Computer Science, Life Sciences, or a related field—or equivalent practical experience.

**Preferred:**

• Proven experience in product analytics, data-driven decision-making, and continuous optimisation of user experience and business outcomes.
• Demonstrated capability in budget allocation, resource planning, and financial performance management to ensure optimal return on investment.
• Experience managing vendor relationships, third-party integrations, and partner collaborations within complex technology environments.
• Knowledge of incident and problem management frameworks, root-cause analysis methodologies, and post-launch value tracking processes.
• Familiarity with FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) and industry-standard data frameworks relevant to R&D environments.

**What will make you successful**

You are a collaborative, curious, and value-oriented leader who sees digital technology as an enabler of meaningful R&D and business outcomes. You are comfortable operating in a fast-paced, evolving environment, balancing strategic ambition with delivery discipline, and bringing diverse teams together around a shared product vision.

Additional Information

Why Syngenta?

• Meaningful impact: help build technology that supports scientific innovation and sustainable agriculture.

• Complex, modern challenges: work on high-scale platforms and systems with room for technical judgement.

• Collaborative environment: partner with global engineering, R&D and product communities.

• Growth: broaden your influence through challenging work, visible outcomes and a global network.