Staff Product Manager, Catalyze360

Eli Lilly and Company develops life-changing medicines and supports the global health ecosystem through scientific discovery and innovation. The Staff Product Manager will own the direction, strategy, roadmap, launch, and ongoing improvement of Catalyze360 products for early-stage biotechnology companies, partnering closely with engineering, design, data science, and drug development teams. The role also includes mentoring product peers, shaping team practices, and navigating enterprise security, privacy, compliance, and R&D requirements.

Responsibilities:

• Live close to the users of your product. Learn how the work actually gets done and where it stalls
• Run lightweight discovery: interviews, prototypes, working sessions. Test what’s worth building before engineering commits
• Decide which problems we take on next, and make the case for the order
• Come out of discovery with a direction the team can build against, not just a summary of what you heard
• Own the area end to end: strategy, scope, roadmap, launch, and the messy period after
• Stay hands-on. The strategy, the specs, and the analysis are yours to write, not to review
• Communicate so decisions stick. Engineering, leadership, and end users should each be able to read what you wrote and reach the same conclusion
• Make the scope calls, including the unpopular ones about what the first release leaves out
• Decide what success looks like before you ship, and make sure we’re instrumented well enough to know either way
• Mentor product managers and product-adjacent peers as the team grows. Make them better at the job, not just better at this product
• Partner with engineering and design on hiring. You sell the role and you hold the bar
• Set how the team works: how discovery runs, how specs get written, how calls get made
• Partner with engineering and design on the plan, and negotiate scope in the open. You’ll push on their estimates and they’ll push on your priorities
• Navigate enterprise infrastructure, security, privacy, and compliance requirements without disrupting development progress
• Get Lilly’s R&D experts into the product itself. Much of what makes these tools worth anything lives only in people’s heads
• Represent the product with end users. You can speak credibly to technical and scientific stakeholders

Requirements:

• • Education: Bachelor's degree
• • 8+ years of product management experience, with a track record of shipping software that end users rely on
• • Demonstrated experience operating as a senior or staff product manager on a small team, not just as a senior PM on a large one
• • Experience taking a product from zero to one, where the users, the product, and the strategy all had to be worked out at once
• • You take a fuzzy problem from research to scope to shipped product without losing the thread
• • You know how to find the real problem. You're as comfortable running a customer interview as a roadmap review
• • You ask “what problem are we solving?” before “what should we build?”
• • You pull your own data. SQL or something like it, enough to define a metric or size a market without waiting on an analyst
• • Enough familiarity with AI/ML to make good product decisions. You don't need to be a data scientist, but you need to understand what the models can and can't do
• • Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features. You understand the practical challenges: reliability, evals, context management, and when not to use AI
• • You can hold your own with engineers on architecture and tradeoffs, and you prototype with AI tools when that's faster than arguing in the abstract
• • You've worked in environments where the roadmap wasn't fully defined and the team was small, and you thrived
• • Self-sufficient. You unblock yourself and figure things out
• • You take ownership broadly. If something isn't working, you fix it rather than wait for someone else to
• • Startup experience matters here more than big-tech tenure
• • You lead with judgment. You don't need a senior title to set direction
• • Low ego, high standards. You'll learn from someone who knows the area better, and you'll push back firmly when you don't agree
• • Experience in life sciences, pharma, biotech, or health tech, especially building for scientists or R&D teams
• • Background building B2B SaaS or platform products
• • Experience shipping into regulated environments, and some familiarity with what that does to data governance and timelines