Senior Director, Digital Product & Process Owner - Sourcing & Category Strategy
About the role
The Senior Director, Intelligent Procurement Products – Category Strategy & Sourcing serves as the Global Process Owner, Digital Product Owner and Experience Owner for Category Strategy and Sourcing. This leader is accountable for the end-to-end business process, the digital products that enable the process, and the experiences through which employees, procurement professionals and suppliers interact with sourcing capabilities.
Major Responsibilities And Accountabilities
Develop and execute the AI strategy for Category Strategy and Sourcing in partnership with Digital, Technology, Data Science and procurement leadership.
Identify opportunities to augment human decision making through predictive analytics, generative AI, intelligent assistants, agentic workflows and intelligent automation.
Design procurement experiences that leverage natural language, conversational interfaces and guided decision support.
Ensure AI enabled capabilities are trusted, explainable, governed and aligned with responsible use expectations.
Lead experimentation with emerging technologies and scale successful solutions into repeatable, enterprise ready capabilities.
Define and maintain a multi-year product roadmap for Category Strategy and Sourcing capabilities aligned to business priorities, user needs and measurable outcomes.
Translate business problems and user pain points into product requirements, product backlog items, capability releases and adoption plans.
Manage tradeoffs across speed, value, risk, usability, compliance and technical feasibility.
Partner with technology and platform owners to ensure sourcing products integrate with intake, contracting, supplier, purchasing, finance and enterprise data ecosystems.
Own the end-to-end Category Strategy and Sourcing process design, documentation, standards, controls and governance model.
Drive standardization, simplification and automation of sourcing and category management across regions and business units.
Define decision rights, governance forums, escalation paths and continuous improvement mechanisms.
Ensure compliance with applicable internal requirements, policy expectations and control standards.
Benchmark internal processes against external best practices and bring outside-in innovation into the process architecture.
Own the experience strategy for employees, procurement professionals and relevant external participants interacting with Category Strategy and Sourcing products and processes.
Create intuitive, consumer grade experiences that make procurement easier to engage with and easier to execute.
Define user satisfaction, adoption, productivity and behavior change metrics and use them to guide roadmap decisions.
Partner with change, communications and training teams to drive adoption and build the skills required to use AI enabled recommendations effectively.
Partner with data and technology teams to define the data products, knowledge assets and analytic capabilities required for intelligent sourcing decision making.
Enable trusted, reusable intelligence across market insights, category plans, supplier intelligence, opportunity assessment and sourcing execution.
Ensure sourcing intelligence is accessible through modern digital experiences, dashboards, copilots and AI enabled workflows.
Use analytics to identify value opportunities, adoption gaps, process friction and improvement priorities.
Collaborate with business units, procurement category teams, Legal, Finance, Technology, Data Science, Compliance and Operations to deliver integrated sourcing capabilities.
Facilitate governance forums that align priorities, resolve tradeoffs and accelerate decision making.
Influence senior stakeholders and teams globally through clear storytelling, data driven recommendations and business value framing.
Engage external partners, industry forums and benchmarking networks to identify emerging practices, technologies and talent expectations.
Qualifications
Minimum education of a bachelor’s degree is required. Advanced degree or equivalent experience preferred.
Minimum of twelve (12) years of experience across procurement, category strategy, strategic sourcing, digital transformation, product management, process ownership or related disciplines is required.
Deep knowledge of category strategy and strategic sourcing practices, including operating models, governance, stakeholder engagement and supplier value creation.
Experience owning enterprise business processes and driving standardization, governance, controls and continuous improvement across global teams.
Experience leading technology enabled transformation, including digital roadmaps, platform implementation, analytics, workflow design or automation.
Demonstrated ability to lead enterprise change, influence senior stakeholders and drive adoption in a global, matrixed environment.
Ability to translate business challenges into digital capabilities, product requirements and measurable outcomes.