Sub Chapter Lead Product Ownership Management

At Roche you can show up as yourself, embraced for the unique qualities you bring. Our culture encourages personal expression, open dialogue, and genuine connections,  where you are valued, accepted and respected for who you are, allowing you to thrive both personally and professionally. This is how we aim to prevent, stop and cure diseases and ensure everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Join Roche, where every voice matters.

The Position

The Position

The key responsibilities are a combination of people leadership, software engineering best practices, product management, and emerging technology enablement.

People Leadership & Talent Development

• Manage, mentor, and coach a team of Product Owners across multiple squads, driving individual growth and professional development.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, career pathing, and hiring to build a high-performing product discipline.
• Cultivate a psychologically safe, high-ownership culture rooted in user empathy and outcome-driven thinking.

Craft Excellence & Ways of Working

• Define, maintain, and champion product management best practices, discovery frameworks, and standard operating procedures across squads.
• Establish clear standards for the critical and effective adoption of AI tools within product discovery and backlog management (e.g., accelerating requirements drafting and market research while maintaining technical rigor, deep domain understanding, and quality).
• Partner with Agile Coaches and Engineering Leads to optimize squad velocity, cross-team dependencies, and release quality.
• Drive consistent standards for backlog health, user story definitions, acceptance criteria, and KPI tracking.

Portfolio Alignment & Strategy

• Act as the connective tissue between executive strategy and squad-level execution, ensuring product strategy and individual backlogs align with broader business and clinical priorities.
• Guide teams in understanding and evaluating AI/ML capabilities, data-driven features, and platform intelligence to unlock scalable value across healthcare workflows.
• Facilitate cross-squad discovery to identify shared dependencies, reusable platform components, and potential delivery bottlenecks.
• Collaborate closely with clinical advisors, medical researchers, and UX designers to translate complex healthcare workflows into scalable SaaS products.

What we are looking for

• Product Leadership Experience: Proven track record managing, coaching, or mentoring Product Owners / Product Managers in modern Agile or matrixed environments.
• SaaS Scaling Expertise: Hands-on experience scaling B2B/B2B2C SaaS products through multi-product expansion or rapid platform growth.
• Modern Product Craft & AI Fluency: Mastery of the full product lifecycle (discovery, hypothesis validation, launch, metric tracking) combined with a solid grasp of how modern AI technologies impact digital products and product workflows.
• Complex Domain Fluency: Ability to navigate complex domains (HealthTech, MedTech, Life Sciences, or heavily regulated industries is a major plus, but a proven ability to grasp deep subject matter quickly is essential).
• Collaborative Communicator: High emotional intelligence, adept at bridging conversations between technical teams, commercial stakeholders, and clinical domain experts.

In addition, a strong communication inside and outside of engineering is critical, working closely with customers and the product and operations teams to translate customer requirements into code.

A healthcare background with experience in integrating healthcare software systems and working with doctors is nice to have; interest and enthusiasm to work in healthcare is critical.

Your Responsibilities

• Product Delivery & Execution: Champion outcome-driven delivery across squads. Ensure Product Owners build healthy, value-focused backlogs, clearly define acceptance criteria, and partner effectively with engineering to hit commitments on time and with high quality.
• People Management & Mentorship: Hire, coach, and retain top product talent. Lead career development, 1:1 coaching, and performance management for Product Owners, fostering a high-ownership, psychologically safe culture.
• Craft Excellence & Agile Ways of Working: Define and uphold best practices for product ownership, modern discovery, and lifecycle management. Drive consistency across squads in user story mapping, customer interview techniques, and data-informed prioritization.
• Portfolio Alignment & Vision: Connect high-level healthcare strategy to day-to-day squad roadmaps. Proactively identify cross-product dependencies, eliminate delivery silos, and ensure the portfolio scales predictably as new products launch.
• Customer-Centricity & Design Thinking: Embed deep user empathy and design thinking into every squad. Guide Product Owners to translate complex clinician, researcher, and patient workflows into intuitive, high-impact SaaS solutions.

Your Qualifications

• Product Leadership & People Management: proven people management experience directly leading, mentoring, and growing Product Owners or Product Managers (running 1:1s, performance management, hiring, and career pathing)
• SaaS & Product Track Record: proven product management experience, with a clear history of launching, scaling, and managing multi-tenant enterprise SaaS applications
• Modern Product Craft: Deep mastery of discovery frameworks, outcome-based roadmapping (OKRs), backlog health, user story definition, and modern continuous delivery in Agile/Scrum environments
• AI & Data Literacy: Practical understanding of AI/ML concepts, capabilities, and generative AI tools. Demonstrated ability to guide teams on how to build intelligent product features and how to leverage AI tools pragmatically to enhance product craft and efficiency.
• Domain & Workflow Fluency: Proven ability to navigate complex, high-stakes domain workflows (experience in HealthTech, MedTech, Life Sciences, or regulated B2B enterprise spaces is highly valued)
• Technical & Clinical Empathy: Strong technical literacy—comfortable collaborating with software architects and engineering leads on technical feasibility, while equally adept at engaging clinical researchers and doctors to uncover core user needs
• Strategic Influence & Stakeholder Management: Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills, with a track record of driving cross-functional alignment, managing multi-product dependencies, and influencing senior stakeholders in a matrixed environment
• Education & Background: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Healthcare/Life Sciences, Design, or equivalent practical experience in digital product leadership

Please note that the global grade displayed is a target global grade for the role and the actual global grade offered to a candidate may vary depending on several factors - including scope and breadth of the role. For further information relating to global grading in Roche please visit the global grading gsite.

Who we are

A healthier future drives us to innovate. Together, more than 100’000 employees across the globe are dedicated to advance science, ensuring everyone has access to healthcare today and for generations to come. Our efforts result in more than 26 million people treated with our medicines and over 30 billion tests conducted using our Diagnostics products. We empower each other to explore new possibilities, foster creativity, and keep our ambitions high, so we can deliver life-changing healthcare solutions that make a global impact.

Let’s build a healthier future, together.

Roche is an Equal Opportunity Employer.