Scientific Product Owner

Key Skills

Data science techniques, Deep Learning, Effective communication skills, Machine learning techniques, Teamwork

Job Description

The Position

This Scientific Product Owner position is responsible for developing data products for pharmacology and therapeutic molecule development organizations. You will partner with stakeholders to create the data product roadmap, which will deliver consistent access to existing and new data. Pharmacology and related modalities require architecting data pipelines to solve complex scientific problems. You will define the personas or customers involved in the full lifecycle spectrum of data products. Starting with data from internal and external sources, you will identify and describe requirements to find, access, consume, protect, and reuse molecular data across research and early development phases and therapeutic areas. Data may include cheminformatics databases, compound catalogs, dynamics, docking, molecular structure, and more. Machine learning models and pipelines will play an increasing role in data products and will be part of the product roadmap. You will define requirements for capturing software versions, model performance metrics, data provenance, and restrictions on sensitive data used in training and testing. Designing a product to flexible for complex and often ambiguous requirements will be essential.

You will enumerate roadmap details to implement tooling and pipelines as well as creating documentation and onboarding assets. Using agile development methodology, features will include a test or evaluate component to define readiness; whether a software method or manual process. This will allow data engineers and data architects to successfully use continuous integration and continuous delivery.

As a primary liaison, you will partner with data stewards to influence process and requirements of chemists, computational modeling scientists, and biophysical experimentalists, with the goal of changing how data is captured and championing requests from data generation stakeholders. This requires aligning with other product owners and specialists across DMI and Global IT to address larger needs. 

Relationships

You will collaborate and partner with various stakeholders such as computational scientists, data scientists, automation platform specialists, experimental scientists, and external partners. Your experience in computational molecular modeling and data workflows will be essential to shape data products. The development of a roadmap will evolve over time to develop new features and rigor of service levels. Key stakeholders will include data scientists, experimental scientists, and scientific project leaders. You will partner with data products engineering teammates to identify existing technical platforms or otherwise highlight technology or process gaps essential to the roadmap.

Essential Functions

The Product Owner will manage the molecular design data product lifecycle to enable Global Research Technology to accelerate using our data for therapeutics discovery and early development.

You will:

• Own the process to develop a data product roadmap in context of business importance
• Have knowledge on business impact and end-user understanding in complex and critical scientific solutions for the digitalization of research data
• Ensure active engagement of scientific stakeholders and align with the business owner
• Create and maintain product team backlog
• Prioritize the backlog according to business value and alignment with product strategy/roadmap objectives
• Work with stakeholders and the agile team to ensure knowledge flow
• Use agile product development techniques to validate fit for purpose features
• Ensure requirements and definitions are delivered according to agreements and relying on roles on the team to deliver robust and well-defined features per schedule agreements
• Collaborate and be transparent

Additional possible functions:

• Lead efforts across multiple projects of varying complexities
• Generate and mature relevant ideas, concepts, and products that bring value to patients and the future Novo Nordisk business. 
• Set direction in the exploration of new concepts & technologies relevant to Novo Nordisk’s ambitions with DMI, supporting our core therapeutic areas
• Lead initiatives to explore the implementation of new technologies and processes in our projects
• Supervise and mentor others and/or oversee project team(s)
• Prepare and present visual and oral reports and proposals to peers and management
• Identify and propose improvement initiatives that evolve and improve the way the team works and collaborates

Physical Requirements

Up to10% overnight travel required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, or PhD is highly preferred. Degree within subject matter expertise preferred; High School Diploma and 10+ years relevant experience minimally required.
• Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years’ relevant experience, or Master’s degree with 5+ years’ relevant experience, or PhD with 4+ years’ relevant experience can be considered
• Relevant experience includes:
• Experience in life sciences, medical device, or pharmaceutical industry
• Knowledge of pharmaceutical research and pharmacology workflows
• Broad expertise spanning data and digital, including the ability to perform hands on technical work
• Excellent communication skills with scientists and engineers as well as business partners; preference given to individuals with experience in molecular design or computational chemistry.

• Structured and focused on driving outcomes
• Resolute and able to negotiate complex expectations
• Structured approach and detail oriented
• Excellent written and oral communication skills is required
• Member of technical projects that require ability to influence, collaborate and lead cross-functional teams with multiple moving parts.
• Ability to thrive amidst ambiguity and discern the unexpressed problems and derived requirements for digital solutions in a complex global organization preferred
• Demonstrated ability to generate valuable and relevant ideas, create concepts and solutions based on prioritized ideas and solutions.
• Individuals with hands-on experience in deep learning workflows using the latest techniques preferred 

We commit to an inclusive recruitment process and equality of opportunity for all our job applicants.

At Novo Nordisk we recognize that it is no longer good enough to aspire to be the best company in the world. We need to aspire to be the best company for the world and we know that this is only possible with talented employees with diverse perspectives, backgrounds and cultures. We are therefore committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates the diversity of our employees, the patients we serve and communities we operate in. Together, we’re life changing.

Novo Nordisk is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by local, state or federal laws, rules or regulations.