Description
About Norstella
Norstella is a premier and critical global life sciences data and AI solutions provider dedicated to improving patient access to life-saving therapies. Norstella supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies across the full drug development lifecycle — from pipeline to patient. Our mission is simple: to help our clients bring therapies to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately impacting patient lives.
Norstella unites market-leading brands - Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, Skipta and The Dedham Group and delivers must-have answers and insights, leveraging AI, for critical strategic, clinical, and commercial decision-making. We help our clients:
- Accelerate the drug development cycle
- Assess competition and bring the right drugs to market
- Make data driven commercial and financial decisions
- Match and recruit patients for clinical trials
- Identify and address barriers to therapies
Norstella serves most pharmaceutical and biotech companies around the world, along with regulators like the FDA, and payers. By providing critical proprietary data supporting AI-driven workflows, Norstella helps clients make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Norstella's investments in AI are transforming how data is consumed and decisions are made, disrupting inefficient legacy workflows and helping the industry become more efficient, innovative, and responsive to patient needs.
Overview
We are hiring a Senior Product Operations Manager to build our product operations function from the ground up. This is a foundational role: we currently operate without formal product ops processes, frameworks, or tooling — and that is exactly the challenge we need you to solve. You will assess where we are, establish the infrastructure that helps our product teams work more effectively, and create the systems that scale with us as we grow. This role requires equal parts strategic thinking and hands-on execution.
Key Responsibilities
Build the Foundation
- Audit current product team ways of working — ceremonies, tools, documentation practices, and cross-functional rituals — and identify the highest-leverage gaps.
- Design and implement a product operations framework tailored to our organization's size, structure, and maturity.
- Establish standards for product documentation, including roadmaps, prioritization frameworks and in conjunction with technical writer, customer facing materials.
- Define and roll out a consistent product development lifecycle (PDLC) across teams.
Tooling & Systems
- Evaluate, select, and implement the tools and platforms that support product planning, backlog management, roadmapping, and cross-team visibility.
- Build and maintain dashboards that give product leadership real-time insight into team health, delivery velocity, and portfolio status.
- Create scalable templates and playbooks that reduce ramp time for new product team members.
Rhythm & Cadence
- Design and own the operating cadence for the product organization: QBRs, roadmap reviews, sprint demos, and leadership syncs.
- Facilitate key product planning ceremonies and ensure the right stakeholders are engaged at the right moments.
- Track and report on product OKRs, ensuring teams have clear goals and visibility into progress.
Cross-Functional Enablement
- Act as the connective tissue between product, engineering, design, and go-to-market teams — identifying misalignments and closing communication gaps.
- Build onboarding and enablement resources that help product managers and stakeholders operate consistently.
- Partner with product leadership to prepare materials for exec reviews, board updates, and strategic planning cycles.
- Drive continuous product training across the organization, with a focus on business case development, market research insights, and synthesis — ensuring product teams and key stakeholders build shared fluency in how to evaluate and communicate opportunity.
Insights & Continuous Improvement
- Establish feedback loops — from users, from internal teams, and from post-launch reviews — and ensure insights are systematically fed back into the product process.
- Identify recurring bottlenecks in how decisions get made or work gets stuck, and drive structural fixes.
- Benchmark against industry best practices in product operations and bring in what is relevant.
Special Projects
- Take on special projects as directed by the Head of Product, operating with full autonomy and minimal overhead — scoping, executing, and delivering independently from start to finish.
Required Skills & Qualifications
- 6+ years of experience in product operations, product management, or a closely related function (program management, strategy & operations).
- Demonstrated experience building or significantly maturing a product ops function — you have done this before, not just read about it.
- Strong systems thinking: you can see how process changes upstream affect outcomes downstream.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to write crisp documentation and facilitate structured conversations with senior leaders.
- Experience with agile methodologies and product development tools (Jira, Confluence, Productboard, Notion, or similar).
- Comfortable with ambiguity and energized by the challenge of creating order where little exists.
- India-based with ability to collaborate across global time zones, including overlap with US teams.
Preferred
- Experience in a high-growth or scaling technology company where product operations was built from early stages.
- Background in healthcare IT, life sciences, or enterprise SaaS.
- Familiarity with OKR frameworks and experience running planning cycles across multiple product teams.
- Prior experience as a product manager — you understand what PMs need because you have been one.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in business, engineering, information systems, or a related field.
What Success Looks Like
In your first 30 days:
- You have completed a thorough audit of current product team practices and produced a prioritized ops improvement plan.
- Key stakeholders trust you as a credible, organized partner who listens before prescribing.
- At least one high-friction process has been meaningfully improved.
By The End Of Year One
- A product operations framework is live and adopted — not just documented.
- Product teams spend less time on coordination overhead and more time on product work.
- Leadership has clear, consistent visibility into roadmap progress, team health, and portfolio priorities.
Why Join Us
Opportunity to work with a collaborative and high-performing Finance team.
Exposure to complex and evolving revenue models in a global business.
Competitive Compensation And Benefits Package.
Career growth and development opportunities.
Our Guiding Principles for success at Norstella:
01: Bold, Passionate, and Mission-First
02: Integrity, Truth, and Reality
03: Kindness, Empathy, and Grace
04: Resilience, Mettle, and Perseverance
05: Humility, Gratitude, and Learning
Benefits
- Health Insurance
- Provident Fund
- Reimbursement of Certification Expenses
- Gratuity
- 24x7 Health Desk
Norstella is an equal opportunity employer. All job applicants will receive equal treatment regardless of race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability or handicap, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), marital or domestic partner status, military or veteran status, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, reproductive health decision making, or any other protected characteristic as established by federal, state, or local law.
Sometimes the best opportunities are hidden by self-doubt. We disqualify ourselves before we have the opportunity to be considered. Regardless of where you came from, how you identify, or the path that led you here- you are welcome. If you read this job description and feel passion and excitement, we're just as excited about you.
All legitimate roles with Norstella will be posted on Norstella's job board which is located at norstella.com/careers. If a role is not posted on this job board, a candidate should assume the role is not a legitimate role with Norstella. Norstella is not responsible for an application that may be submitted by or through a third-party and candidates should proceed with extreme caution if a third-party approaches them about an open role with Norstella. Norstella will never ask for anything of value or any type of payment during or as part of any recruitment, interview, or pre-hire onboarding process. If you are aware of or have reason to believe a job posting purportedly for a role with Norstella is fraudulent or otherwise not authorized by Norstella, please contact the Company using the following email address: [Confidential Information]. 
