Enterprise Product Lead - Salesforce

About the Role

The Salesforce Enterprise Product Lead will lead the organization’s Salesforce strategy design and execution, ensuring it effectively supports business processes and objectives. This role involves strategic planning, leading implementation initiatives, and continuous improvement of Salesforce solutions to optimize data integrity, operational efficiency, and business outcomes. The position requires a strong technical background in Salesforce applications, project/program management, and collaboration with cross-functional teams to align Salesforce applications with business needs, manage vendor relationships, and lead support teams.

This leader will help the organization stay current with Salesforce market trends, including cloud Salesforce, platform-as-a-service capabilities, and embedded AI. The role involves managing costs, prioritizing initiatives with business stakeholders, and driving measurable value from early to late stages of projects. As a key member of the senior IT management team, the Enterprise Product Lead will collaborate with IT and business unit leaders to spearhead digital transformation initiatives, optimize application value, and ensure security and compliance.

Occasional availability outside of traditional working hours is required to address urgent business needs, such as security incidents, software deployments, system breaks, or other critical operational requirements. The ideal candidate must be proactive, adaptable, and committed to minimizing disruption to business operations.

This is a hybrid role requiring in-office presence a minimum of three days a week to facilitate collaboration, teamwork, and engagement with staff and students. Flexibility to perform duties outside of primary responsibilities is essential to support evolving business needs.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement a comprehensive strategy for enterprise applications that supports organizational business goals and objectives.
• Conduct buy-build-customize analyses in collaboration with the software engineering team and develop plans to operationalize results; own, maintain, and promote awareness of the application strategic roadmap.
• Lead digital transformation efforts by identifying opportunities for innovation and improvement while overseeing multiple, overlapping large application initiatives.
• Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performance team of IT professionals, fostering a culture of innovation, excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Build productive relationships with business leaders to influence how applications can enable new sources of value; conduct regular stakeholder satisfaction surveys, publish results, and implement action plans for improvement.
• Oversee the management of the enterprise applications portfolio, ensuring it meets current and future business requirements; evaluate and prioritize projects based on strategic alignment, ROI, and risk.
• Perform ongoing buy-build-customization analyses for current and future portfolio components; identify opportunities for system modernization, integration, automation, and rationalization.
• Safeguard the reliability, availability, and performance of enterprise applications; implement best practices for application lifecycle management, including development, deployment, maintenance, and support.
• Manage master data across applications and ensure data integrity.
• Establish and maintain strong relationships with key vendors and partners; develop a nuanced understanding of strategic vendors’ roadmaps and how they support business objectives.
• Collaborate with IT sourcing and vendor management teams to strengthen the company’s position in negotiations with software and service vendors.
• Work with internal governance teams to ensure enterprise applications comply with all relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards; oversee risk management processes to identify, assess, and mitigate risks.
• Develop and manage the budget for enterprise applications, ensuring optimal allocation of resources and cost-effectiveness.

Requirements

• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in IT, with at least five years in a leadership role managing enterprise applications supporting multiple business units, including security, business process, reporting, and integration resources.
• Proven track record of leading digital transformation initiatives and implementing large-scale IT projects.
• Extensive experience with Salesforce, preferably in an environment that deployed 3+ modules.
• Demonstrated success in vendor and stakeholder management.
• In-depth knowledge of enterprise application platforms, cloud computing, immersion technologies, and general IT architecture for security and integrations.
• Ability to use strategic planning to translate business goals into technology solutions.
• At least one of the following certifications: Salesforce SalesCloud, MarketingCloud, or Agentforce.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills; ability to collaborate with executives, stakeholders, and teams across the organization to influence and achieve common goals.
• Experience partnering with Fundraising or Higher Education is desired.
• Strong project management skills, including experience with agile methodologies and change management.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities; proficiency in data analysis and performance metrics.
• Authorization to work in the United States; the University is unable to sponsor this role now or in the future.

Schedule

This is a hybrid role requiring in-office presence a minimum of three days a week.

Occasional availability outside of traditional working hours is required to address urgent business needs.