Therapeutic Area Strategy Head, CRM

Novartis • Cambridge, MA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Therapeutic Area Strategy Head will lead a therapeutic area focused team in the creation and ongoing update of a holistic and aligned Enterprise portfolio strategy for their Therapeutic Area (TA). The candidate will work closely with the senior leaders within the cardio-renal-metabolic (CRM) TA including Bio-medical Research (BR), Development and Commercial organizations in US and International and Search & Evaluation. The candidate will bring a passion for innovation, deep industry experience, scientific acumen and strong judgement to guide internal choices and drive sustainable growth in the short, mid and long-term in CRM. This individual will have both a broad and deep understanding of the CRM field to drive insightful and differentiating competitive advantages over our peers by bringing a third-party view around key strategic levers and external analyses, trends, and white space opportunities. Additionally, they will conduct targeted primary research.

Requirements

• Advanced degree or equivalent experience in life science/healthcare required, Cardiologist training highly desirable.
• Demonstrated cross‑functional global leadership experience is essential.
• Minimum 10 years of pharmaceutical/biotech experience gained in banking, consulting, or biopharma, with exposure to drug development and ideally commercialization required.
• Proven ability to operate effectively in a highly matrixed, fast paced environment.
• Candidates with significant senior leadership experience — including Biotech CEOs and executives from investment banking or other Wall Street institutions are strongly preferred.
• Ability to comfortably engage with the C-suite and mid-career associates to influence and challenge with excellent interpersonal and leadership skills.
• Strong financial and business acumen with strong understanding of biopharma landscape; companies, assets and early technologies.
• Strong strategic vision, superior leadership, excellent communication, consensus building, and well-developed influencing and negotiation skills.
• Excellent conflict resolution skills to facilitate agreement and buy-in at the senior-most levels.
• Experience leading and managing a team with a variety of insights from science to commercial and proven coaching and mentoring experience.

Nice To Haves

• Cardiologist training highly desirable.

Responsibilities

• Builds and maintains in-depth knowledge of the TA (early pipeline to commercial); including disease models; responsible for ongoing assessment of peer companies with heavy exposure in the TA.
• Educates, updates and provides external views to all internal stakeholders.
• Provides insight within key portfolio governance processes (diligence and external landscape mapping with BD&L and M&A).
• Supports identification of growth accretive opportunities, indications, disease spaces and rejection of low value opportunities/projects.
• Supports Group Investor Relations and the CEO Office with dissemination of key strategic insights.
• Ongoing collection and synthesis of scientific and commercial insights for the TA.
• Leads the process of creating, maintaining and updating enterprise-wide TA portfolio strategy, including disease area and molecule selection to drive mid- and long-term growth in collaboration with RDC.
• Identifies potential pipeline gaps, makes recommendations to address.
• Works closely with key stakeholders in the Therapeutic Area Leadership (TAL) team to facilitate portfolio decision making, prioritization and trade-offs.
• Oversees assessments of programs fit to current portfolio strategy and facilitates central review for assets inside and outside current priorities (e.g., at Innovation Management Board (IMB)).
• Provides consolidated commercial and development inputs to support business cases for internal and external assets and programs.
• Provides outside-in independent view of internal assumptions around core pipeline.
• Leads the development of assessment of external opportunities (e.g., forecast assumptions, business cases).
• Coaches, attracts, develops, and retains top talents; partners with P&O leadership to develop people strategy (e.g. organization development, performance, career development).
• Plans, allocates, and manages TA strategy financial budget by anticipating expenditures, accurately forecasting resource needs/costs and properly accounting for expenses to meet requirements and achieve fiscal responsibility.

Benefits

• health, life and disability benefits
• a 401(k) with company contribution and match
• a variety of other benefits
• generous time off package including vacation, personal days, holidays and other leaves
• performance-based cash incentive
• eligibility to be considered for annual equity awards

What This Job Offers

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