Staff Product Manager, Catalyze360

At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us.  Organization Overview Lilly Catalyze360 is a comprehensive approach to enabling the early-stage biotech ecosystem by democratizing access to infrastructure, expertise, and resources. Through its interconnected pillars – Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, Lilly ExploR&D, and Lilly TuneLab – Catalyze360 strategically removes barriers that traditionally block bold science from becoming life-changing medicines, providing biotechs with flexible combinations of capital, physical lab space, R&D capabilities, AI/ML tools, and decades of enterprise learning. Catalyze360 is building products for early-stage biotechs so that a small team can operate with the capabilities of a scaled organization at a fraction of the headcount. Our focus is the operational work that runs alongside the science, where the workflows today are manual, fragmented, or often missing entirely. At a small biotech, that work often lands on two or three people who are also leading the research.

Today this expertise reaches biotechs one company at a time through Lilly’s own scientists. The work is to partner with them and turn what they know into products that scale. A biotech should get most of the way on its own and reach an expert at the point where that’s what it actually needs. We’re hiring a Staff Product Manager to own this area. It’s an individual contributor role. You set the direction for your area, you decide what the first release leaves out, and you answer for whether it worked. You’ll join with products already in flight and a roadmap in place, and we expect you to challenge both. The biggest risk here isn’t building too slowly. It’s building the wrong thing. We would rather spend an extra two weeks on the problem than a quarter on the wrong answer. When something isn’t working, you should be comfortable being the one who says so. You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering, design, data science, and drug developers along the way.

Pick the problems worth solving 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 product 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. Lift the team 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