Sr. Product Lifecycle Excellence Manager

Xylem is a Fortune 500 global water solutions company dedicated to advancing sustainable impact and empowering the people who make water work every day. As a leading water technology company with 23,000 employees operating in over 150 countries, Xylem is at the forefront of addressing the world's most critical water challenges. We invite passionate individuals to join our team, dedicated to exceeding customer expectations through innovative and sustainable solutions.
THE ROLE:
The Sr. Product Lifecycle Excellence Manager will build and scale the enterprise practices that enable Xylem to manage products and portfolios from strategy and investment through development, launch, in-market optimization, simplification, and end-of-life. This role translates Product Management Excellence strategy into practical governance, standards, decision frameworks, metrics, and operating rhythms that improve portfolio focus, lifecycle discipline, and profitable growth. This is a hands-on enterprise builder role for a leader who combines strong product and portfolio judgment with 80/20 thinking, financial acumen, change leadership, and disciplined execution. The successful candidate will not own segment product decisions. Instead, they will equip and challenge business teams with a common lifecycle system, transparent data, and repeatable methods that help leaders make better trade-offs and act faster.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES: To perform the job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily.
1. Establish the enterprise product lifecycle management system
· Define and continuously improve the enterprise product lifecycle framework from strategy and ideation through development, launch, in-market management, renewal, rationalization, and end-of-life.
· Clarify lifecycle stages, decision rights, required inputs, governance forums, escalation paths, and accountabilities while preserving segment and division ownership of product decisions.
· Connect product lifecycle activities to existing enterprise planning and operating rhythms, including portfolio strategy, long-range planning, annual operating planning, product development, productivity, and performance reviews.
· Create practical standards, playbooks, templates, and review criteria that simplify work, improve consistency, and make lifecycle expectations easy to apply across diverse businesses.
· Baseline current practices, identify friction and gaps, prioritize improvements, and manage a phased roadmap toward a scalable future-state lifecycle operating model.
2. Build & standardize portfolio simplification and 80/20 lifecycle discipline
· Establish a repeatable enterprise approach for portfolio segmentation, product-line simplification, SKU and platform rationalization, and end-of-life management using 80/20 principles and customer-value logic.
· Partner with segment product leaders to identify long-tail complexity, duplication, low-value variation, legacy offerings, and other opportunities to simplify while protecting customer commitments, revenue quality, service, and strategic capabilities.
· Develop common decision criteria for invest, grow, maintain, migrate, consolidate, harvest, and exit choices, including replacement and customer-transition considerations.
· Enable product managers to translate simplification findings into executable product-line plans, resource shifts, innovation priorities, and measurable value-capture actions.
· Capture lessons and proven practices from business-led complexity-reduction efforts and scale them across Xylem without creating unnecessary central bureaucracy.
3. Strengthen in-market product and portfolio performance management
· Define the minimum performance view needed to manage products throughout their commercial life, including growth, profitability, mix, vitality, adoption, quality, service, complexity, and customer-value indicators where data is available.
· Create standard product and portfolio review rhythms that surface performance gaps, decision needs, risks, and opportunities rather than only reporting activity.
· Partner with Finance, Data and Analytics, IT, and business teams to improve data definitions, reporting consistency, product hierarchy, and portfolio visibility.
· Build executive-ready dashboards and narratives that connect lifecycle actions to growth, margin, cash, productivity, customer outcomes, and reinvestment choices.
· Promote disciplined follow-through by documenting decisions, owners, milestones, value hypotheses, and realized outcomes.
4. Improve launch-to-end-of-life decision quality
· Partner with product development and innovation process owners to strengthen the lifecycle handoffs between portfolio strategy, discovery, product development, commercialization, launch, post-launch review, and ongoing product management.
· Define consistent expectations for launch readiness, post-launch performance reviews, corrective actions, benefit realization, and transition into sustained in-market management.
· Ensure end-of-life decisions include clear business rationale, risk assessment, inventory and supply implications, customer and channel migration, service and spare-parts considerations, communications, and accountable execution plans.
· Institutionalize learning from launches, simplification initiatives, investments, and after-action reviews to improve future decisions and standards.
· Identify opportunities to use automation and AI to reduce manual effort, improve insights, and accelerate lifecycle decisions while maintaining appropriate governance.
5. Lead cross-functional adoption and continuous improvement
· Build trusted partnerships with segment and division product leaders and with Engineering, Innovation, Finance, Supply Chain, Procurement, Manufacturing, Quality, Service, Marketing, Sales, Sustainability, IT, and Data and Analytics.
· Lead through influence in a global matrix, balancing enterprise consistency with business context and adapting implementation to maturity, product type, and market needs.
· Facilitate portfolio and lifecycle working sessions that convert complex analysis into clear choices, aligned actions, and measurable outcomes.
· Create adoption plans, stakeholder communications, office hours, coaching, and practitioner guidance in partnership with the Product Management Academy and Community lead.
· Measure the effectiveness and adoption of lifecycle practices, recommend where to scale, redesign, simplify, automate, or stop, and provide regular progress updates to senior leadership.
QUALIFICATIONS:
Required:
· Bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, marketing, finance, operations, product management, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
· 8+ years of experience in product management, portfolio management, product lifecycle management, product operations, strategy, or a closely related role, with experience leading complex cross-functional initiatives.
· Demonstrated ownership of end-to-end product or portfolio lifecycle decisions, including product strategy, development governance, launch, in-market performance, simplification, and end-of-life.
· Experience applying 80/20, portfolio segmentation, product-line simplification, SKU rationalization, platform or variant reduction, or comparable complexity-management methods.
· Strong financial and analytical acumen, with the ability to connect product and portfolio choices to growth, margin, cost, working capital, productivity, and investment trade-offs.
· Proven ability to create enterprise frameworks, governance, metrics, and operating rhythms that improve decision quality and adoption in a global matrixed organization.
· Excellent facilitation, stakeholder-management, executive communication, and change-leadership skills, including the ability to influence without direct authority.
· Ability to move between strategy and hands-on execution, manage mu