Staff Product Manager, Catalyze360

Eli Lilly and Company • San Francisco, CA

22d • Onsite

About The Position

Lilly Catalyze360 is a comprehensive approach to enabling the early-stage biotech ecosystem by democratizing access to infrastructure, expertise, and resources. Through its interconnected pillars – Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, Lilly ExploR&D, and Lilly TuneLab – Catalyze360 strategically removes barriers that traditionally block bold science from becoming life-changing medicines, providing biotechs with flexible combinations of capital, physical lab space, R&D capabilities, AI/ML tools, and decades of enterprise learning. Catalyze360 is building products for early-stage biotechs so that a small team can operate with the capabilities of a scaled organization at a fraction of the headcount. Our focus is the operational work that runs alongside the science, where the workflows today are manual, fragmented, or often missing entirely. At a small biotech, that work often lands on two or three people who are also leading the research. This role is an individual contributor position where the Staff Product Manager will own the strategy, scope, roadmap, launch, and post-launch operations for their product area. The biggest risk is building the wrong thing, so a focus on problem definition and user understanding is paramount. The role involves close collaboration with engineering, design, data science, and drug developers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree.
• 8+ years of product management experience, with a track record of shipping software that end users rely on.
• Demonstrated experience operating as a senior or staff product manager on a small team.
• Experience taking a product from zero to one, where users, product, and strategy all had to be worked out simultaneously.
• Ability to take a fuzzy problem from research to scope to shipped product without losing the thread.
• Ability to find the real problem and ask 'what problem are we solving?' before 'what should we build?'.
• Proficiency in pulling own data, using SQL or similar tools to define metrics or size markets without waiting on an analyst.
• Sufficient familiarity with AI/ML to make good product decisions, understanding model capabilities and limitations.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features, understanding practical challenges like reliability, evals, context management, and knowing when not to use AI.
• Ability to hold discussions with engineers on architecture and tradeoffs, and prototype with AI tools.
• Experience in environments where the roadmap wasn't fully defined and the team was small, thriving in such conditions.
• Self-sufficient, able to unblock oneself and figure things out.
• Takes ownership broadly and fixes issues rather than waiting for others.
• Leads with judgment and can set direction without a senior title.
• Low ego, high standards.
• Willingness to learn from experts and push back firmly when disagreeing.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in life sciences, pharma, biotech, or health tech, especially building for scientists or R&D teams.
• Background building B2B SaaS or platform products.
• Experience shipping into regulated environments and familiarity with data governance and timelines in such contexts.

Responsibilities

• Pick the problems worth solving by living close to users, running lightweight discovery (interviews, prototypes, working sessions), and testing what's worth building before engineering commits.
• Decide which problems to take on next and make the case for the order, coming out of discovery with a clear direction for the team.
• Own the product end-to-end: strategy, scope, roadmap, launch, and the post-launch period.
• Stay hands-on with strategy, specs, and analysis.
• Communicate decisions effectively so they stick with engineering, leadership, and end users.
• Make scope calls, including unpopular ones about what to exclude from the first release.
• Define success metrics before shipping and ensure adequate instrumentation for measurement.
• Mentor product managers and product-adjacent peers as the team grows.
• Partner with engineering and design on hiring, setting the bar for the team.
• Set how the team works, including discovery processes, spec writing, and decision-making.
• Partner with engineering and design on the plan and negotiate scope openly.
• Navigate enterprise infrastructure, security, privacy, and compliance requirements without disrupting development progress.
• Get Lilly’s R&D experts into the product itself.
• Represent the product with end users and speak credibly to technical and scientific stakeholders.

Benefits

• Company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance).
• Company-sponsored 401(k).
• Pension.
• Vacation benefits.
• Eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits.
• Flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts).
• Life insurance and death benefits.
• Certain time off and leave of absence benefits.
• Well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).

What This Job Offers

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