Director, Product Development - Enhanced Water & Connected Devices

Culligan Quench

About The Position

The Director, Product Development - Enhanced Water & Connected Devices is a senior product and platform leadership role spanning product strategy, software, firmware, cloud infrastructure, IoT data, connected-device experiences, and cross-functional execution. Twist is the immediate priority, including the installed fleet and future countertop and freestanding products. The longer-term mandate is to establish repeatable connected-product practices that can support Purity, ice machines, and future connected products. The role is the business owner for the connected-product layer: defining problems, desired outcomes, and priorities. Product Development & Engineering and technical partners retain technical design and implementation authority within their disciplines. The Director aligns these groups through clear requirements, governance, decisions, and measurable outcomes. The position owns Twist product strategy and roadmap, business and product requirements for firmware and cloud capabilities, IoT data-product and connected-service requirements, and governance across internal teams and partners. It establishes operating practices, release management, decision rights, and executive reporting; defines future connected-product capabilities and operating models; and helps build and lead a team as business needs justify investment. Success includes predictable delivery, stable support across product generations, clear accountability, measurable business cases and outcomes, improved customer and service experiences, and a multi-year capability and talent plan.

Requirements

10+ years of progressively responsible product-management, platform, software, IoT, or connected-device experience, including leadership at the director or senior-director level.
Demonstrated ownership across the product lifecycle, from customer discovery and business cases through requirements, delivery, launch, measurement, sustaining, and lifecycle decisions.
Experience working across software, firmware, cloud, connected hardware, data products, UX, APIs, fleet management, or operational platforms.
Ability to translate business and customer needs into clear product requirements, priorities, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
Experience leading external development partners, shared technical organizations, or complex matrixed delivery models.
Strong executive communication, structured problem-solving, stakeholder leadership, and comfort operating through ambiguity.
Demonstrated ability to build teams, operating models, governance practices, or organizational capabilities over time.
Bachelor's degree or equivalent relevant experience; an advanced degree is helpful but not required.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree.

Responsibilities

Own the Twist product-family vision, product strategy, and long-range roadmap across current and future generations.
Define and prioritize feature sets, software and user-experience requirements, market opportunities, business cases, pilots, release sequencing, and lifecycle decisions.
Provide product requirements and functional specifications to inform hardware, electronics, firmware, cloud, and system-development decisions.
Partner with Enhanced Water Operations and Sales, Marketing, Service, Operations, and Finance on launch readiness, channel needs, pricing and packaging inputs, enablement, and performance measurement.
Use customer, market, fleet, service, and competitive evidence to make roadmap decisions and communicate tradeoffs to leadership.
Own business and product requirements for firmware across supported Twist generations and for cloud capabilities enabling connected experiences.
Lead governance of the DTI-to-Novus transition and establish day-to-day ways of working with Novus and the Culligan Center of Excellence.
Coordinate support plans for parallel Twist 2.0 and 3.0 firmware and software environments, including prioritization, sprint alignment, testing, acceptance, release sequencing, deployment, and sustaining.
Own product-level prioritization of defects, remote diagnostics, alerts and notifications, APIs, on-device UX and accessibility, fleet-management capabilities, and enterprise integrations.
Establish visibility into roadmaps, capacity, dependencies, risks, and release impacts across Culligan Quench, the Center of Excellence, and partner teams.
Partner with Engineering and security and data stakeholders on architecture implications, security requirements, data governance, and technical tradeoffs.
Define the IoT data-product roadmap and the machine, fleet, customer, commercial, and service insights needed to improve business performance.
Own requirements for fleet-health reporting, operator-facing analytics, customer-facing connected experiences, portals, enterprise data sharing, and performance dashboards.
Use dispense patterns, field-failure data, product usage, and operational feedback to inform priorities and measurable success criteria.
Define requirements for proactive service triggers and predictive-maintenance use cases with Service, Care, IT, Operations, and Analytics.
Ensure connected-product initiatives include adoption plans, business cases, workflow implications, training requirements, and post-launch measurement.
Establish a common operating cadence across Product, Engineering, the Center of Excellence, Novus, Service, Operations, Commercial, and other partners.
Create clear decision rights, requirements-review practices, roadmap governance, sprint and release touchpoints, risk escalation, and executive reporting.
Align delivery priorities with available capacity and enterprise priorities, and build evidence-based business cases when initiatives require broader organizational change or investment.
Serve as a senior escalation point for connected-product requirements, partner performance, release risks, and cross-functional tradeoffs.
Build trusted relationships across Culligan Quench, Culligan, and external partners while maintaining accountability for outcomes.
Define the future-state connected-product operating model for 2028 and beyond, including which capabilities Culligan Quench should own directly and which should remain with the Center of Excellence or external partners.
Develop the capability roadmap for firmware, cloud, data, quality assurance and testing, UX, and technical-product resources as scale and business cases justify investment.
Help recruit, onboard, coach, and lead future team members and establish career paths and standards for connected-product work.
Extend common connected-device practices across Twist, Purity, ice machines, and future products without creating category-specific silos.
Promote reusable capabilities, including telemetry standards, diagnostics, alerts, integration patterns, release governance, field-feedback loops, and lifecycle discipline.