New Product Development Manager

Watts Water Technologies•Fort Worth, TX

19h•Onsite

About The Position

The NPD Manager leads all new product development and introductory activities for water quality conditioning and filtration solutions. This role is responsible for driving cross‑functional execution of the product roadmap, ensuring new products are effectively developed, validated, and launched. Working closely with Engineering, Product Management, Marketing, Operations, Quality, Manufacturing, and Sales, the NPD Manager establishes disciplined NPD processes, aligns stakeholders, and ensures timelines, manufacturability, and customer requirements are met. The role combines strategic oversight with hands‑on leadership to deliver successful product launches that support business objectives. This position is responsible for supervision of New Product Development Engineers. This position reports to the Director of Research and Development and is an onsite role based in Fort Worth, Texas.

Requirements

Bachelor of Science degree in an engineering field from an accredited university
7+ years’ experience in new product development
Experience and working knowledge of water treatment systems
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Understanding of and adherence to applicable laws, codes, policies, regulations, and safety practices and procedures, as applicable.
Must successfully establish employment eligibility and satisfactorily complete background checks and required pre-employment testing as a condition of employment.

Nice To Haves

Strong team facilitation and leadership skills to drive effective decision-making and execution of action plans.
Ability to tactfully assign task accountability and recognize accomplishments on behalf of WAS leadership.
Ability to create processes for tracking, prioritizing and forecasting new product development process status.
Strong communications toolset that allows for simplifying complex issues and interactions.
Able to identify and prioritize needed actions to elevate barriers of various nature (technical, administrative, resource requirements):
Able to team effectively with site leadership, factory personnel, Engineering and other functions with high degree of performance credibility.
Strong bias for speed, intelligent risk-taking, and fast learner
Justifies resource requirements with appropriate financial analysis and business rationale
Laboratory management skills
Understanding of lean principles and constraint theory for managing processes
Knowledge of sales, inventory, and operations planning methods, service part planning/optimization tools, MRP and ERP systems preferred.
Proven leadership success with strong written and oral communication skills.
Experience motivating teams in the face of exceptional challenges.

Responsibilities

Lead and coordinate the New Product Development team in all aspects of new product introduction to deliver against the product roadmap.
Establish and maintain a phased NPD process with defined deliverables from internal stakeholders, including performance metrics across functions.
Develop and maintain tools to track and communicate all aspects of product and product‑introduction changes, accounting for evolving configurations and customer requirements.
Facilitates regular production meetings to coordinate interactions, communicate status, capture and ensure schedule commitments are met and barriers for action and elevation are identified.
Maintain rolling action item lists focused on barrier removal, accountability, and process efficiency.
Collaborate across cross‑functional teams—including Production, Quality, Manufacturing, Engineering, Sales, and Product Management—to drive product changes.
Develops and maintains performance metrics/dashboard that drives milestone fidelity and highlights key phase gate deliverables.
Sets and enforces documentation standards for the new product development team.
Drives decision-making and sets team priorities to ensure new product introductions align with business needs.
Ensures alignment of all functions to the change activities keeping critical timelines to drive success.
Serves a critical role within a broader program management team, with cross-functional team members aimed at meeting customer requirements.
Develop and drive multi-functional site level management teams to assist in resolving product issues in concert with the program management teams.
Assess and drive the manufacturability needs for all changes being introduced
Contribute hands on to the development and testing of new products.
Assume responsibility for other projects and duties as assigned by Director of Research and Development or Company management.
Responsibility directly tied to Watts Value (Integrity, Accountability, Continuous Improvement, Transparency).