Senior Product Manager

Oterra•Sturtevant, WI

11d•$145,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Global Product Manager reports directly to the Chief Product & Strategy Officer and holds strategic and commercial responsibility for assigned natural color pigment portfolios across food, beverage, and pet food applications. The role translates market insight, customer needs, competitive dynamics, and portfolio economics into clear product strategies, innovation priorities, pricing recommendations, and cross-functional execution. Success is defined by measurable growth, stronger portfolio differentiation, improved profitability, and long-term value creation for customers and Oterra. Own the strategic and commercial performance of assigned natural pigment portfolios, ensuring each product has a clear market role, lifecycle position, value-based pricing logic, and investment rationale. Bring discipline to portfolio choices by prioritizing the opportunities with the strongest potential to drive growth, differentiation, margin improvement, and customer value. Translate customer insight, competitive intelligence, market data, and portfolio economics into actionable decisions across product strategy, innovation, pricing, and go-to-market execution. Operate as the connective point between Commercial, Applications, R&D, Operations, Finance, and regional teams, ensuring portfolio decisions are fact-based, commercially grounded, and consistently executed.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in product management, portfolio management, strategy, innovation, or commercial leadership within food ingredients, natural colors, flavors, specialty chemicals, or related industries.
Demonstrated experience managing a multi-product or multi-category portfolio simultaneously, with clear accountability for performance across more than one product line.
Technical familiarity with natural pigments - including plant extracts, fermentation-derived colorants, or microalgae - is a significant advantage; a genuine curiosity about color science and application technology is essential.
Strong commercial acumen and proven understanding of portfolio economics, pricing, profitability, and value creation across complex product ranges.
Experience influencing innovation investment decisions and managing product lifecycle strategies across multiple categories.
Demonstrated ability to translate strategy into execution and measurable business results, managing multiple concurrent priorities without losing focus or quality.
Experience managing performance through KPIs, dashboards, and structured business reviews in a matrixed, global organization.
Proven track record of driving change and continuous improvement within complex, cross-functional environments.
Continuous improvement mindset: familiarity with Lean, or similar methodologies is strongly preferred, with the ability to apply these principles to commercial and product management processes - not just operations.
Able to hold expert-level knowledge across multiple pigments simultaneously while maintaining a coherent view of the overall portfolio - breadth and depth in equal measure.
Strong analytical capabilities with a fact-based approach to decision making across a complex, multi-category product range.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to distil multi-pigment portfolio complexity into clear, actionable recommendations for senior stakeholders.
Highly organized and self-directed: comfortable managing multiple parallel workstreams across different pigment categories in a fast-paced, global environment.
Collaborative and credible: able to work effectively across R&D, Commercial, Finance, Applications, and regional teams, and to influence without direct authority.
Commercially curious: proactive in seeking out customer insight, competitive intelligence, and market trends across all assigned pigments.
Bachelor's degree in Food Science, Business, Marketing, Engineering, or a related discipline; MBA preferred.
Ability to travel approximately 20% of the time, including occasional international travel.

Nice To Haves

MBA preferred.

Responsibilities

Act as the internal subject matter expert on assigned pigments, applications, market dynamics, customer needs, competitive developments, and relevant regulatory shifts.
Own a structured Voice of Customer program, including customer interviews, application feedback, complaint analysis, and commercial input, ensuring insights are documented and translated into portfolio, innovation, and investment decisions.
Develop segmentation models, value propositions, and differentiated positioning for each pigment system to strengthen customer relevance and competitive advantage.
Participate in selected customer engagements as product and portfolio expert, bringing market reality back into strategic decision-making.
Develop and maintain global portfolio strategies and roadmaps for all assigned pigment categories, aligned with Oterra’s growth ambitions, customer needs, and long-term strategic objectives.
Manage the strategic interplay between pigments, identifying where products compete, complement, or create customer choice, and ensure the portfolio is positioned coherently across categories and regions.
Lead portfolio optimization, including expansion, rationalization, lifecycle management, category prioritization, and discontinuation recommendations, supported by clear business cases.
Simplify portfolio complexity by focusing resources on the highest-value opportunities while maintaining the right balance across pigment technologies, applications, and market segments.
Own portfolio KPIs across assigned pigments, including growth, profitability, innovation effectiveness, market penetration, and achievement of strategic targets.
Monitor performance by pigment category, region, and segment; identify growth and margin gaps; and lead root-cause analysis and corrective actions with Finance, Commercial, and regional teams.
Develop pricing recommendations for new and existing products within the global pricing framework, considering value delivery, competitive benchmarks, substitution risk, discounting, and margin contribution.
Build and maintain portfolio dashboards and fact-based review routines to support annual planning, portfolio reviews, pricing reviews, and executive decision-making.
Partner with Innovation, R&D, Commercial, Applications, and Marketing to define and prioritize the innovation pipeline across assigned pigments.
Lead stage-gate submissions and investment recommendations, ensuring decisions are grounded in customer need, market attractiveness, technical feasibility, commercial potential, and expected returns.
Balance near-term launches and longer-horizon innovation bets across pigments, making explicit prioritization choices and communicating trade-offs clearly.
Define success metrics for innovation initiatives and track post-launch performance to improve future commercial outcomes and resource allocation.
Lead cross-functional execution of portfolio priorities across Commercial, R&D, Applications, Operations, Finance, Marketing, and regional teams.
Align stakeholders on portfolio priorities, positioning, growth plans, pricing logic, and go-to-market execution for each pigment category.
Enable successful commercialization through clear value propositions, launch support, customer-facing materials, and differentiated positioning tailored to each pigment.
Remove barriers to delivery, maintain momentum across parallel workstreams, and escalate resource or investment decisions to the CPSO where required.