Vice President, Global Product Platforms & Innovation

The mission

MFT has won regionally for decades through local customer intimacy and local execution. That strength is real, and it stays. But the next chapter of our growth depends on a different muscle. A small set of global product platforms, designed once, reused everywhere, protected and improved at the enterprise level. We have built equipment one region at a time for a hundred years. We are now going to find out if we can build it for the world.

Role

The missionMFT has won regionally for decades through local customer intimacy and local execution. That strength is real, and it stays. But the next chapter of our growth depends on a different muscle. A small set of global product platforms, designed once, reused everywhere, protected and improved at the enterprise level. We have built equipment one region at a time for a hundred years. We are now going to find out if we can build it for the world. The forces pushing us here are real. MFT grew through decades of regional success and selective acquisitions. That history built strong local businesses, and it also left us running parallel platform efforts that are getting more expensive every year. The technology underneath our products has shifted from mostly mechanical to increasingly software, controls, and connectivity, and that shift punishes fragmentation in a way mechanical-only equipment did not. We are creating the Vice President, Global Product Platforms & Innovation role to build that muscle from the ground up. You will own MFT’s most important platforms end to end. Strategy, roadmap, architecture, technical execution, lifecycle, and economics. The single exception is manufacturing, which is owned by regional plants. You will stand up a dedicated platform organization that has not existed at MFT before. You will define the lanes between platform and region, and you will hold both sides to them.

Role Responsibilities & Expectations

• Strategy and roadmap. Own the global roadmap for MFT’s priority platforms across a three-to-five-year horizon. Decide what is core and reusable versus what is locally adapted, and keep that boundary stable. Set architecture guardrails that protect scalability, quality, and long-term integrity. Sequence investment across the three platforms based on customer demand, technical readiness, and enterprise value, and revisit that sequencing on a defined cadence.
• Building the organization. Identify and select the talent, assemble the teams, appoint your Platform Leaders as direct reports, each owning one platform end to end with a small dedicated technical team that executes the roadmap, manages lifecycle, and develops go-to-market enablement through Voice-of-Customer work. Each Platform Leader is an accountable business owner for their platform.
• Operating model. Run platform-to-region as a service contract. Regions can rely on what the platform team ships, and the platform team is held to what it commits. Establish a clean handoff to regional manufacturing. Designs, specifications, and validated configurations from platform; production from regional plants. No overlap between platform teams and regional engineering, except where regions are doing local adaptation or reuse on top of the core.
• Technical leadership. Make the architecture calls. Develop platforms with a lifecycle mindset. Manufacturability, reliability, serviceability, and clear paths for future upgrades. Build quality and reliability in from the start.
• Platform economics. Own the economic view of each platform. Partner with Group Finance to make platform economics visible at the enterprise level, so reinvestment decisions are made on enterprise value rather than regional P&L visibility alone.
• Regional alignment. Bring regional and customer input into platform strategy through defined channels while keeping enterprise discipline. Build credibility by shipping platforms regional teams can actually commercialize, support, and scale.

Skills & Experience

• 12+ years of senior product, platform, or core-technology leadership in a global organization, with full lifecycle accountability for at least one platform from concept through commercialization and sustaining.
• Documented results across regions. Adoption, time to market, cost or margin, or quality and reliability. Numbers you can defend.
• Experience operating where a global team owns the platform core and regional teams own localization, launch, manufacturing, and customer execution.
• Technical depth in electromechanical, engineered product, or equipment platforms. Strong grasp of platform economics and the ability to make and defend reinvestment cases at the enterprise level.
• Track record of building a function or operating model from an early state to a delivering state, not only running an established one, and of hiring and developing senior platform or product leaders as direct reports.

About Marmon Holdings

Marmon Holdings, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway company, comprises 11 groups and more than 100 autonomous businesses with total annual revenue of $10 billion. Marmon’s 28,000-plus team members are celebrating the company's 70th anniversary in 2023 and helping write the next chapter of Marmon's story.

Pay Range

$233,200.00 - $350,000.00