Global Insights Director

About AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca fosters a collaborative culture that emphasizes knowledge-sharing, ambitious thinking, and innovation, enabling employees to work across teams, functions, and global locations. The company supports individualized flexibility while maintaining a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork through in-office engagement three days a week. The Toronto head office and BlueSky Hub are designed to facilitate collaboration, providing spaces for strategizing, brainstorming, and connecting on key projects. Sustainability is central to AstraZeneca’s culture, reflecting the interconnectedness of people’s health, the planet, and business success, with ambitious initiatives addressing climate change, healthcare access, and disease prevention.

Role Summary

The Director sets the insights, analytics, and AI-enabled evidence agenda for a key brand. As a member of the Brand Leadership Team, this role influences senior commercial, medical, and market access decisions by translating data, market signals, customer needs, and digital opportunities into clear strategic choices, measurable outcomes, and enterprise value.

Role Overview

The Director acts as a strategic partner to senior leaders, integrating market, customer, scientific, real-world, competitive, and digital signals to shape brand strategy, customer engagement, launch excellence, and growth. This role also establishes expectations for the responsible use of data, digital tools, and artificial intelligence, ensuring outputs are trusted, compliant, inclusive, explainable, and aligned with business value, patient impact, and enterprise priorities.

Key Responsibilities

• Insights Generation and AI-Enabled Decision Support:
  • Set the strategic insights agenda for the brand, aligned with enterprise strategy, brand ambition, launch turning points, investment decisions, and measurable outcomes.
  • Integrate primary market research, competitive intelligence, secondary data, real-world data, digital engagement signals, advanced analytics, and AI-enabled tools to inform brand strategy, forecasting, resource allocation, and investment decisions.
  • Translate complex data and external signals into clear recommendations, helping senior leaders understand opportunities, trade-offs, risks, and execution implications.
  • Use AI and advanced analytics, where appropriate and compliant, to identify patterns, test hypotheses, improve decision quality, and optimize field and omnichannel performance.
• Primary Market Research, Customer Understanding and Responsible Data Use:
  • Own the primary market research strategy, translating senior leadership questions into a prioritized insights plan with clear decision impact, budget rigor, and delivery expectations.
  • Apply modern research approaches, including digital listening, behavioral science, agile testing, social and search insights, AI-assisted synthesis, and mixed-method research, where appropriate and compliant.
  • Hold vendors and internal partners accountable for quality, delivery, compliance with AstraZeneca policies, data privacy, and responsible AI principles, while sharing standard processes across teams.
• Analytics, Performance Reporting and Digital Transformation Orchestration:
  • Orchestrate insights across Brand, Advanced Analytics, Competitive Intelligence, Market Access, Medical, Finance, Digital, and other partners to build a coordinated view of performance, opportunity, and risk.
  • Set direction for benchmark development, dashboards, performance routines, and insights storytelling, enabling senior leaders to make timely decisions.
  • Lead case analyses, scenario modeling, predictive analytics, and opportunity sizing to guide strategic choices.
  • Champion scalable ways of working, including automation, self-service analytics, reusable data assets, experimentation, and clear governance of AI-enabled tools.

Required Qualifications And Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree
• Experience conducting qualitative and quantitative market research across different collaborator groups, including healthcare professionals, patients, and payers.
• Five or more years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry.
• Proven ability to conduct analytics using secondary data sources relevant to the pharmaceutical industry, such as IQVIA, Prognos, Decision Resources, and patient-level data, as well as experience with performance tracking.
• Strong business acumen, critical-thinking skills, and understanding of sales and marketing practices.
• Ability to influence both laterally and vertically across an organization.
• High emotional intelligence.
• Demonstrated ability to lead projects.
• Ability to manage multiple tasks and assignments to demanding deadlines with minimal supervision.
• Strong interpersonal, collaboration, and teamwork skills.
• Comfortable working in a matrix environment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience leading insights for a specialty product, with knowledge of specialty pharmacy and buy-and-bill distribution and tracking.
• Experience in specialty biologics, respiratory, or immunology therapy areas.

Desirable Qualifications And Experience

• A high degree of creativity and innovation in developing new approaches, processes, and methodologies.
• Experience conducting pre-product-launch market research, including positioning and segmentation.
• In-depth knowledge of respiratory biologics market dynamics.