Market Development Manager - Pharma Solutions, Lipids

Croda is hiring a Market Development Manager to guide growth of its Pharma Solutions lipids portfolio. The role leads customer and market discovery, assesses opportunities, and translates scientific, technical, and commercial insight into recommendations for portfolio strategy, investment, partnerships, and commercialization.

Responsibilities:

• Establish and lead a systematic voice-of-customer program across priority market segments and strategic growth areas
• Develop a deep understanding of customer workflows, unmet needs, decision criteria, adoption barriers, and buying behaviors
• Build trusted relationships with customers, partners, industry experts, research institutions, and market influencers
• Identify and assess new applications, technologies, customer segments, adjacent markets, and business-model opportunities
• Evaluate market size, growth potential, strategic fit, customer value, commercial attractiveness, adoption barriers, risk, and value potential
• Maintain a prioritized pipeline of validated opportunities with documented assumptions, evidence gaps, risks, and next actions
• Develop actionable competitive and industry intelligence, including market trends, partnerships, investments, substitute technologies, and emerging developments
• Translate customer and market insight into recommendations for portfolio strategy, strategic platforms, innovation, partnerships, positioning, market entry, and commercialization
• Support market-driven business cases, investment proposals, partnership evaluations, and strategic growth initiatives
• Lead priority customer discovery, segmentation, market assessment, competitive-intelligence, and opportunity-assessment work
• Translate complex scientific, technical, customer, and market information into concise business implications and executive recommendations
• Partner across Portfolio Management, Product Management, Business Development, R&D, Technical and Strategic Marketing, regional commercial teams, Operations, Quality, Regulatory, Legal, Intellectual Property, Finance, and Customer Service
• Ensure mature opportunities transition effectively to the appropriate portfolio, platform, partnership, product-management, or commercial owner
• Complete required training and follow applicable health, safety, environmental, privacy, and compliance requirements

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in life sciences, chemistry, biochemistry, biotechnology, pharmaceutical sciences, engineering, business, marketing, or a related field required
• Experience in market development, strategic marketing, product management, business development, market intelligence, commercial strategy, or a related role in life sciences, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, drug delivery, specialty ingredients, or an adjacent market
• Demonstrated success identifying and evaluating market opportunities and converting customer needs into clear business recommendations
• Experience designing and conducting voice-of-customer programs, customer interviews, workflow research, market research, segmentation, market sizing, and competitive analysis
• Experience supporting strategy, portfolio, innovation, partnership, investment, commercialization, or market-entry decisions
• Strategic perspective with the ability to connect customer needs, market dynamics, technology trends, and business priorities
• Strong research, interviewing, workflow analysis, segmentation, market sizing, forecasting, scenario-development, and competitive-intelligence capability
• Sound commercial judgment and strong analytical and business-case development skills, including financial framing and recommendation development
• Ability to separate facts, assumptions, hypotheses, risks, evidence gaps, and confidence levels when information is incomplete or conflicting
• Excellent written, verbal, interpersonal, presentation, and facilitation skills across technical and commercial audiences
• Ability to influence without direct authority, build alignment, manage multiple priorities, and follow through in an ambiguous and changing environment
• Curiosity about emerging science, technologies, applications, customer needs, and business models, paired with the discipline to test assumptions objectively
• Proficiency with standard business, research, analysis, presentation, and collaboration tools
• Advanced scientific or business degree preferred
• Experience in lipids, lipidomics, diagnostics, drug delivery, pharmaceutical ingredients, research tools, or related scientific markets preferred