GCS System Excellence Director – Global Commercial and Platforms

Pfizer • New York City, NY

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

GCS is a newly unified organization bringing together legacy Commercial Strategy & Innovation (CSI), Global Marketing, and Global Access Strategy & Pricing (GASP) to establish a single commercial voice to R&D and strategic leadership across the portfolio lifecycle. As GCS moves through its AI transformation, the organization is building a Connected Intelligence System (CIS): an AI-native operating system in which GCS owns the meaning, the workflows and the standards, and AIA owns the technical build. The GCS System Excellence Director – Global Commercial and Platforms is a new headcount role within Global Commercial Strategy, reporting to the GCS Transformation Lead. The role owns workflow design specification excellence for the Global Commercial workflows in collaboration with the Portfolio Marketing & Operations lead and the shared platform functions those workflows draw on as needed, including Launch, the Commercial Portfolio Management Team and the Marketing Academy. Its purpose is to make GCS ownership of the system specification real and buildable: to collaborate with SME workflow owners to define what excellent looks like in those workflows, encode it so that agents and colleagues can use it, and set the quality bar each component must meet before it ships. There is an explicit boundary with the Marketing Academy. This role does not build, own or duplicate the marketing excellence standards that the Marketing Academy authors and versions in the marketing model. This role takes those standards and makes them work within commercial workflows in a way that supports and enables systems design. It is not a technical build role; the build sits with AIA, with whom this role must partner, but delivers the system and agent specifications AIA and Digital engineers need to build. This role specifies and proposes the workflow standards, quality gates and calibration thresholds, as well as the requirements AIA builds against. The role is accountable for the quality, coherence and continuous improvement of its domain workflows, evidenced through clear standards and KPIs. This is a role for an AI-native leader. The role holder is expected to demonstrably role-model and drive the cultural shift at the heart of the transformation: thinking and designing at the workflow and system level at all times, and building at the personal “incubator” level to demonstrate what requirements need to be, so AIA can take those requirements and build something that functions in the way GCS needs it to. In this way the role is a direct bridge for the move from consumer of generative AI to AI systems thinkers & “incubators” that GCS is asking of every colleague and leader.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree required in related life sciences degree; advanced degree/MBA preferred.
• 8 years of experience in commercial strategy, marketing, launch, brand or commercial operations in pharmaceutical or biotech, including deep domain expertise in Global Commercial workflows at Global level.
• Demonstrated domain mastery with the rare ability to formalize it: defines quality at the component and workflow level and encodes it into rules, standards and specifications that others, and agents, can use.
• Experience translating domain and craft excellence into structured, systematized ways of working; comfort designing business rules, input schemas and quality criteria.
• Proven ability to partner with technical build teams, specifying requirements and setting a quality bar that engineering builds and tests against, without owning the build itself.
• Ability to partner with capability owners such as the Marketing Academy, integrating their standards into workflows without duplicating, diluting or owning them.
• Proven ability to govern a body of standards as a living asset: versioning, decisions and assumptions capture, and continuous improvement.
• Comfort working in ambiguity in a fast-paced transformation environment, making recommendations to leadership with rationale.
• Experience in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, life sciences, healthcare, consulting or other regulated industries preferred.
• Candidates must be authorized to be employed in the U.S. by any employer.
• This position requires permanent work authorization in the United States.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with AI-enabled or agentic workflows, canon design, and structured knowledge specification for agents.
• Highly desirable: a demonstrated ability to build at the personal “incubator” level – creating something that demonstrates what the requirement needs to be rather than building for enterprise deployment.
• A working understanding of the handoff point between GCS specification and AIA build, so requirements land in a form AIA can act on without repeated clarification cycles.
• Familiarity with launch excellence, portfolio marketing, omnichannel or shared commercial platform workflows.
• Experience authoring business rules, excellence standards, taxonomies or content and knowledge schemas.
• Familiarity with critical thinking frameworks and human-in-the-loop or human-on-the-loop design.
• Strong facilitation, written communication and executive-ready synthesis skills.
• Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.

Responsibilities

• Owns Domain and Workflow Excellence for Global Commercial & Platform Functions
• Owns how work is done well across the Global Commercial and Platform workflows, and the shared platform functions those workflows draw on as needed: Launch, the Commercial Portfolio Management Group and the Marketing Academy.
• Makes GCS ownership of the specification real: defines what good looks like at the workflow and component level, not just for the whole, and encodes it so agents and colleagues can use it.
• Focuses on the commercial workflows and their systematization, so domain excellence is expressed as usable, agent-ready ways of working rather than static guidance.
• Partners with the relevant Domain SME leader to be the point of contact for that domain that AIA, Digital and adjacent teams turn to for what the Global Commercial workflows must do and to what standard.
• Makes Excellence Standards Work Within Commercial Workflows
• Takes existing marketing excellence standards, built and owned by the GCS Marketing Academy, and other GCS Platform Leads and makes them work within commercial workflows in a way that supports and enables systems design and data capture.
• Does not author, own or duplicate the marketing excellence standards. The Marketing Academy / Platform Leads build those standards; this role encodes and integrates them into workflow, system design and data flows.
• Bridges standards into systems: translates domain and craft excellence into structured business rules, inputs and hand-offs that agents and GCS colleagues can execute reliably.
• Keeps a clean seam with the Marketing Academy and Platform Functions, so standards flow one way into workflows and are never reinvented, diluted or broken up in the process.
• Authors the Workflow Business Rules and Canonical Specification
• Authors the business rules, workflow logic and canonical specification that agents read for Global Commercial workflows with the relevant SME commercial process owners where critical thinking must be applied (the Critical Thinking Spine) and where human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop hand-offs sit.
• Designs the input and output schemas and knowledge structures agents read, so each workflow has the structured context it needs to run well.
• Specifies the sequence, triggers and decision points of each workflow with relevant SMEs so that each can be orchestrated consistently across agents and people.
• Designs the system such that the decisions, context and assumptions behind each standard and rule are captured and retrievable, ensuring a living decisions and assumptions record for the domain.
• Sets the Quality Bar and Proposes Calibration
• Sets the quality bar each workflow component must meet before it ships, defining excellence at the component level rather than only the whole.
• Specifies and proposes the quality gates, feature thresholds and calibration criteria for the domain (the proposer line).
• Evidences proposed thresholds so they can be tested; the decision on whether thresholds are right, whether they are met and whether to release sits with the Transformation Lead.
• Uses live performance and user feedback to refine standards and propose workflow improvements for continuous improvement.
• Governs the Domain Knowledge ‘Canon’ and Owns the Domain Backlog
• Versions and governs the domain canons, aligned to Platform Lead specifications, as a living asset, so standards, rules and schemas stay current, coherent and trusted as the system grows.
• Owns the backlog for the domain: prioritizes the workflow standards, rules and requirements to be specified and improved.
• Hands AIA the domain requirements and specifications; AIA decides what to build against them and in what sequence.
• GCS owns the meaning and the specification; AIA owns the build, the engineering and testing against it.
• Keeps the domain workflows coherent with the wider Connected Intelligence System, flagging cross-domain dependencies to the Transformation Lead and the Domain Excellence and Data Lead.
• Never Loses Sight of Outcomes and Reinvested Time
• Keeps every workflow standard tied to the business outcome it exists to serve, so excellence is measured by impact, not activity.
• Ensures the workflows this role systematizes genuinely release time, and keeps sight of that time being reinvested in judgement, relationships, creativity and conscience rather than simply absorbed.
• Feeds domain performance evidence to the Transformation Lead to support a rounded view of value and ROI, for which the Transformation Lead is accountable.

Benefits

• 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions and an additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution
• paid vacation, holiday and personal days
• paid caregiver/parental and medical leave
• health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage
• Relocation assistance may be available based on business needs and/or eligibility.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director