Associate Director, Financial Sharing Area(FSA) Product Owner

Job Description

Associate Director, Financial Sharing Area(FSA) Product Owner

The Opportunity

• Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare.
• Be part of an organization driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products.
• Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.

Our Technology Centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of our company’s IT operating model, Tech Centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy.

A focused group of leaders in each Tech Centre helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers.

Role Overview

As part of the EIT Finance Value Team, Accounting to Reporting (AtR) product line this role serves as the Product Owner/Product Manager for the Financial Sharing Area (FSA), a single, secure repository of standardized, high-quality financial data supporting financial accounting, management reporting, analytics, and other business consumers of financial data. The FSA is integral to monthly, quarterly, and year-end financial close.

Defines the product vision and strategy focused on value, business outcomes, risk, and user experience; owns the product through its lifecycle; develops the product roadmap; and creates, maintains, and continuously prioritizes the product backlog to maximize value delivery and long-term sustainability. Partners closely with Product Line/Value Team Leads, Technical Leads, Product Designers, Product Analysts, user and customer groups, business stakeholders, and delivery squads.

Drives release and support planning and execution

• Works closely with Product Line Leads and partners to implement enhancement initiatives that advance outcomes for stakeholders.
• Clearly communicates product requirements to delivery squad(s) to maximize value.
• Drives continuous product discovery to understand user needs and translate them into solutions and backlog items.
• Creates, maintains, and continuously prioritizes the product backlog to maximize value and sustainability.
• Drives release and support planning and execution (go-to-market), including cutover, hypercare, and readiness for financial close cycles.
• Connects delivery squad(s) with customers and facilitates direct communication.
• Engages with technical teams to support resolution of IT solution issues and incidents.
• Develops and regularly calibrates product metrics; leads adoption and retention efforts.

FSA delivery and operational support Product delivery and portfolio management

• Owns the FSA roadmap and backlog; prioritizes features, technical debt, and risk reduction for accounting, reporting, and analytics use cases.
• Leads end-to-end delivery from discovery and requirements through design, build, testing, deployment, and value realization.
• Defines milestones, resource plans, deliverables, dependencies, and critical path; manages cross-team dependencies across data, platform, and application squads.
• Ensures alignment with AtR strategy, finance calendar, Sarbanes‑Oxley controls, and enterprise architecture standards.
• Drives data product thinking for FSA (domains, SLAs, data quality rules, cataloging/lineage, privacy/classification).

Operational excellence and support

• Owns day-to-day operations of the FSA, including stability, performance, capacity, and cost management (TCO/FinOps).
• Establishes and meets SLAs/SLOs for availability, query performance, and incident response; reports on operational KPIs.
• Oversees incident, problem, and change management; leads production triage and root-cause analysis with blameless postmortems.
• Ensures robust access controls and audit readiness via Analytic Privileges/HANA Security Roles and enterprise governance policies.
• Coordinates maintenance windows, release management, regression testing, and disaster recovery/business continuity plans.

Stakeholder and financial close enablement

• Partners with Controllership, FP&A, Tax, Treasury, and Analytics teams to translate needs into FSA capabilities and data products.
• Serves as the primary point of contact for FSA consumers; maintains transparent intake, prioritization, and publishes release notes/roadmaps.
• Supports close operations with timely, accurate data availability; orchestrates cutovers, dry runs, and hypercare during close.

Governance, risk, and compliance

• Maintains strong controls for financial data, including lineage, reconciliation, segregation of duties, and audit trails; partners with Internal Audit and Compliance.
• Proactively manages risks and issues; implements mitigation and contingency plans for critical reporting periods.
• Ensures adherence to data privacy, security, and regulatory requirements; stewards master/metadata quality with data governance teams.

People and vendor leadership

• Ensures proper resourcing and skills mix across internal teams and partners for delivery and operations; manages vendor performance and SOW outcomes.
• Coaches and mentors team members; fosters a culture of continuous improvement, automation, and measurable value creation.

Measurement and value realization

• Defines and tracks product and operational KPIs (e.g., data latency, DQ defects, availability, query cost, user adoption, backlog cycle time, incident MTTR).
• Measures performance vs. plan/budget; drives corrective actions and optimization initiatives.
• Builds business cases, quantifies benefits, and communicates value delivered to stakeholders and leadership.

Monitors and optimizes product's total cost of ownership (TCO)

• Monitors run costs, capacity, and usage; drives efficiency, right-sizing, and automation.
• Balances investment across features, risk reduction, reliability, and technical debt to optimize TCO.

What should you have

Qualifications — Required

• Proven experience in Program Management, Project Management, and Portfolio/Program/Project Support.
• Strong skills in Stakeholder Relationship management, Risk Management, and Measurement/Performance Analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to leverage technical knowledge to operate effectively in a digital environment and translate technical constraints into actionable business decisions.
• Experience working closely with technical SMEs and technical job families (Information Architecture, Software Engineering, Data Engineering).
• Hands-on knowledge of SAP HANA, including architecture and operational concepts (in-memory database, columnar storage, and performance tuning), and practical experience with HANA sidecar deployments and integrations.
• Practical experience supporting or delivering custom-built applications on SAP HANA (e.g., HANA sidecar models, XS/XS Advanced, native HANA services) and familiarity with common integration patterns (ODBC/JDBC, SLT, SDI/SDQ, APIs).
• Familiarity with HANA data modeling (calculation views, attribute/analytical views), SQL Script, and performance optimization techniques relevant to enterprise applications.
• Experience collaborating with SAP functional teams (e.g., Basis, Security) and cloud/on-premises infrastructure teams to support deployment, monitoring, and scaling of HANA-based solutions.
• Track record of leading cross-functional initiatives with measurable outcomes, including delivery of technical milestones, post-deployment support, and continuous improvement for production systems.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to present technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and translate business requirements into technical acceptance criteria.

Qualifications — Preferred

• Experience as a Product Owner/Product Manager for financial systems or data platforms supporting accounting and reporting.
• Deep understanding of financial accounting, management reporting, analytics, and financial data consumers.
• Expertise in business processes and stakeholder needs; ability to set product vision and strategy; define and monitor KPIs for value and user experience.
• Experience working with Product Line/Value Team Leads, Technical Leads, Product Designers, Product Analysts, user groups, business stakeholders, and external partners.
• Familiarity with monthly/quarterly/year-end close processes and associated controls.

Technical Platform

• SAP HANA Sidecar
• SAP SLT Replication
• HANA Table Functions
• HANA Stored Procedures
• SAP HANA Studio
• HANA-native modeling techniques
• Custom ETL processes
• Analytic Privileges / HANA Security Roles
• Trino (Data Sharing)
• Autosys (Orchestration)
• Airflow (Orchestration)
• DIFW/S3 integrations

What should you have

• 11+ years of experience IT and/or project/product management role
• Proven ability to manage cross-functional teams and vendor resources to optimize the delivery and performance of the SAP HANA Platform.
• Experience in a large, global corporation, overseeing strategic product management plans for the SAP HANA Platform to align with customer needs.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to drive initiatives to meet business objectives
• Ability to adapt quickly in a dynamic and complex environment
• Demonstrated ability working with Microsoft Office product suite
• Proven track record of communicating effectively across stakeholder groups
• Excellent organizational and time management skills, including the ability to support multiple projects and deadlines
• Must be a self-starter, quick learner and be able to deliver under deadlines

What we look for

Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.

Who we are

We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been inventing for lives, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world.

#HYDIT2025

Required Skills:

Asset Management, Benefits Management, Management System Development, Product Management, Requirements Management, Stakeholder Relationship Management, Strategic Planning, System Designs

Preferred Skills:

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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully 
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company.  No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails. 

Employee Status:

Regular

Relocation:

VISA Sponsorship:

Travel Requirements:

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Hybrid

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Hazardous Material(s):

Job Posting End Date:

06/6/2026

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