VP, Product Management - Health Research Segment

at Wolters Kluwer in Riverwoods, Illinois, United States

Job Description

The Vice President of Product Management is a high-profile and critical role, responsible for delivering annual revenues as budgeted for the Medical Research sector. The VP will play a pivotal role in developing comprehensive expert solutions and a new aggregation product portfolio for researchers in health and medicine. The role will include providing sales enablement tools, establishing a robust partnership licensing pipeline, and building a strong M&A pipeline.

This role will be at the forefront of our business, supporting the development and growth of our aggregation and expert solution strategy. This includes the Ovid Synthesis and Ovid Discovery solutions, delivering new GenAI products, and achieving the annual revenue budget. This will be accomplished through a combination of innovative product development, focusing on proprietary content, strategic third-party content acquisition, third-party product partnerships, and the creation and management of data-driven sales enablement initiatives.

These initiatives will guide the effectiveness of sales and marketing, including pricing optimization, lifecycle account management, upsell/cross-sell strategies, and the pursuit of new market opportunities to build new research expert solutions.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

+ Lead the Product Management team to achieve budget goals and support the development and growth of our aggregation and expert solution strategy. This includes the Ovid Synthesis and Ovid Discovery solutions and the overall Ovid product portfolio.

+ Optimize the value proposition of the product portfolio by initiating product simplification to simplify offerings and support GTM initiative, introduce and execute solution and value selling strategy, pricing negotiation, and cross-sell upsell for the portfolio.

+ Engage deeply with our customers. Understanding and anticipating customer needs is at the heart of our product strategy. Regular interaction with key customers, working with UXD team with contextual customer inquiry, gathering feedback, and using this information to inform product development and strategy will be a critical part of the role.

+ Ongoing market analysis is a key responsibility for the Vice President of Product Management. Keeping abreast of industry trends, competitor products, and emerging technologies will enable the VP to make informed decisions and keep our offerings relevant and competitive.

+ Drive White Space growth strategy by utilizing customer research to create expansion opportunities for sales and marketing teams and managing lead-to-cash efforts to capture new business opportunities.

+ Build a new aggregation strategy within the Health Research segment from the ground up to develop new research solutions leveraging GenAI to address key market needs and drive higher growth for Ovid focusing on proprietary content, independent of low-margin society journal acquisitions.

+ Drive expansion into expert solutions in medical research by continuing the growth of Ovid Synthesis by building new modules and developing additional expert solutions either by building or acquisitions.

+ Build a pipeline of partnerships of expert solutions to complement Ovid and to deepen the value proposition in the medical research market.

+ Establish a process for signing and integrating partnerships into core GTM processes.

+ Develop a lifecycle management process to ensure partnerships achieve revenue objectives and result in acquisitions.

+ Manage and oversee all GTM strategies from a business perspective to ensure that all GTM activities follow a structured, data-based approach to market development and sales execution.

+ Oversee the Sales Enablement function to continually improve upsell/cross-sell, packaging, white space analysis, creating data-based sales opportunities for the sales team to pursue.

+ Manage the Pricing team in alignment with strategic pricing goals, utilizing business intelligence to optimize pricing power for high-potential customer niches, pushing harvest pricing for end-of-life segments, and optimizing pricing levels for at-risk customers across 12,500 institutional Ovid customers.

+ Serve as the business lead for WK in all negotiations for larger deals (over $250K) and strategic deals. These include deals with consortia, governments, read-and-publish requests, CROs, large biopharma, and all software sales.

+ Act as the primary business representative for Medical Research in major deals exceeding $250K, as well as strategic deals. These encompass agreements with consortia, governments, read-and-publish (R&P) agreements, CROs, and Ovid Synthesis and Ovid Discovery Deals.

+ Foster a stronger value-oriented approach to presentations by the business to key external clients and sales team. This involves emphasizing the value of Ovid, our long-term business commitments, and our growth roadmap.

+ Assume the role of the primary decision-maker on key contractual and business terms. This includes multi-year pricing, open access offsets, and the Total Access business model.

+ Coordinate all internal teams as necessary to finalize negotiations on strategic deals. This includes sales, marketing, legal, pricing, finance, technology, risk management, among others.

+ Create a strategy to improve price increases and set yearly go-to-market prices for the entire portfolio of products.

+ Revitalize the Strategic Partnership group to drive consistent year-on-year growth in content partner revenues, aligning with the business strategy and introducing new expert solutions partners into the Ovid ecosystem.

+ Renegotiate licensing terms with publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, etc.) to enable WK to continually scale revenues and create new product offerings using third-party content.

+ Create a steady pipeline of new opportunities for third-party content and third-party expert solutions.

+ Manage the content acquisition team to progress opportunities from signing to building WK’s market presence in medical and health research solutions.

+ Establish a robust strategy for driving go-to-market (GTM) processes around all content and product partnerships to ensure projected growth targets.

+ Drive all M&A activities for the Medical Research sector.

+ Collaborate closely with the Health division M&A Strategy group to build and convert a steady pipeline of acquisition targets in Open Access, medical and health publishers, expert solutions including systematic review to drive Medical Research growth goals.

+ Directly manage appropriate acquisitions to successfully integrate and scale them within the Medical Research team.

+ Indirectly ensure integration of other acquisitions into the appropriate management structure within HLRP to ensure successful scaling and achievement of the deal-book.

+ Manage and improve all sales operations activities with the Orion back-office solution to improve the efficiency of the medical research business. This includes devising a strategy for auto-renewal and easy renewal, product creation, pricing requests to third-party partners, sales training and enablement, royalty calculations and presentations, and more.

+ The Vice President of Product Management will also be responsible for mentoring and developing the product management team. This includes providing training, setting performance goals, and fostering a positive and innovative work environment.

+ Support the SVP/GM of the Health Research Segment as part of high-level business strategy development, team culture creation, market problem-solving, and other group-wide activities as needed.

Job Qualifications:

Required Education:

+ B.A. or B.S. or equivalent experience

Required Experience :

+ Minimum 15 years at senior management level in an information industry context

+ Strong background in managing P&L from a business/product perspective in a B2B