Director, Commercial Data - Animal Health

The role owns the business leadership required to make Customer MDM effective across the Commercial organization, translating Commercial strategy, market needs, and business priorities into master data requirements, governance decisions, adoption plans, and measurable business value. It requires a leader who can work across global, regional, and market stakeholders, manage significant dependencies, and keep the organization focused on practical outcomes: trusted customer data, clear decision rights, market readiness, and value realization.

• Serve as the primary business lead and strategic partner for Customer MDM across the Commercial organization.
• Translate Commercial strategy, business priorities, and market needs into clear customer master data requirements.
• Build alignment across global, regional, and market stakeholders to support decision-making, funding, prioritization, and adoption.

• Define and maintain business rules, policies, standards, and decision rights for customer master data.
• Establish data quality expectations, KPIs, and business controls to ensure customer data is trusted and fit for use.
• Drive data quality at the source by clarifying accountability in systems of record and upstream business processes.
• Chair the Customer Data Governance Council and use it to drive decisions, issue resolution, prioritization, and escalation where needed.

• Act as the business process owner for Customer MDM, ensuring that processes, ownership, governance, and technology capabilities work together.
• Define and communicate the business value of quality customer data, including sales force effectiveness, commercial execution, marketing campaign accuracy, customer engagement, reporting and analytics, and customer satisfaction.
• Prioritize markets, business units, and use cases based on ROI, commercial impact, data readiness, and organizational readiness.

• Lead global change management and market readiness for Customer MDM rollout and continuous improvement.
• Act as business sponsor for adoption, alignment, and sustained usage of Customer MDM capabilities.
• Coordinate readiness activities with markets and business units, including stakeholder engagement, communication, business validation, training needs, and adoption feedback.

• Partner with Commercial, IT, Data & Analytics, Privacy, Compliance, Legal, and regional teams to ensure Customer MDM supports business objectives, regulatory expectations, and appropriate handling of consent, retention, access, and data usage questions.
• Translate dependency and decision needs across business, data, technology, privacy, and compliance stakeholders so issues are resolved at the right level.
• Escalate privacy, compliance, legal, or policy decisions to the appropriate accountable owners while ensuring Customer MDM requirements and processes reflect agreed guidance.

• Stakeholder leadership experience: Proven ability to build trusted relationships across global, regional, market, Commercial, IT, Privacy, Compliance, and Data & Analytics stakeholders, including engagement with both sponsors and working teams.
• Master Data Management expertise: Deep understanding of master data management principles, governance models, data quality practices, stewardship frameworks, and customer data lifecycle management.
• Commercial domain knowledge: Strong understanding of commercial business processes, including customer engagement, sales operations, marketing, CRM, territory management, and commercial analytics.
• Governance and decision-making leadership: Experience leading cross-functional governance forums, driving alignment, resolving conflicts, and establishing clear decision rights across stakeholder groups.
• Business and data understanding: Strong ability to connect business process, data ownership, source-system behavior, governance requirements, and adoption dynamics to identify root causes and practical solutions.
• Business transformation experience: Proven experience leading enterprise-scale transformations involving process standardization, organizational change, technology adoption, and operating model evolution.
• Value realization mindset: Ability to define business outcomes, establish measurable success metrics, and demonstrate ROI from data and process investments.
• Global influence and complexity management: Experience working across global, regional, and market organizations, balancing standardization with legitimate local needs and driving outcomes through influence in matrixed environments where direct authority is limited.
• Data and technology literacy: Strong understanding of CRM platforms, customer data ecosystems, analytics, integration concepts, and the role of MDM platforms.

• Clear and adopted business rules for customer master data.
• Improved data quality at source systems and reduced recurring data issues.
• Effective governance cadence with timely decisions and issue resolution.
• Market readiness plans in place for prioritized rollouts.
• Visible business value linked to commercial effectiveness, campaign accuracy, analytics readiness, and customer experience.
• Strong stakeholder alignment across Commercial, markets, IT, Data & Analytics, Privacy, Compliance, and Legal, with clear escalation paths for policy or regulatory decisions.

• Bachelor's degree and 10+ years industry experience

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Where required by law, the compensation range for this role is provided below.

The salary range for the primary location of this role is:

This range reflects the Company's reasonable expectation of the base salary applicable to this role at the time of posting. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, government requirements, and business or organizational needs. The successful candidate will be eligible for annual bonus and long-term incentive, if applicable.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits. Available benefits include medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family), retirement benefits, including 401(k), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days. More information about benefits is available at https://jobs.merck.com/us/en/compensation-and-benefits.