Director, Product Development - Enhanced Water & Connected Devices

About the role

Responsibilities

• Own the Twist unit product-family vision, product strategy, and long-range roadmap across current and future generations.
• Define and prioritize feature sets, software and user-experience requirements, market opportunities, business cases, pilots, release sequencing, and lifecycle decisions.
• Provide product requirements and functional specifications that inform hardware, electronics, firmware, cloud, and system-development decisions.
• Partner with Enhanced Water Operations leader and Sales, Marketing, Service, Operations, and Finance on launch readiness, channel needs, pricing and packaging inputs, enablement, and performance measurement.
• Use customer, market, fleet, service, and competitive evidence to make roadmap decisions and communicate tradeoffs to leadership.
• Own business and product requirements for firmware across supported Twist generations and for the cloud capabilities that enable connected experiences.
• Lead governance of the DTI-to-Novus transition and establish effective day-to-day ways of working with Novus and the Culligan Center of Excellence.
• Coordinate support plans for parallel Twist 2.0 and 3.0 firmware and software environments, including prioritization, sprint alignment, testing, acceptance, release sequencing, deployment, and sustaining.
• Own product-level prioritization of defects, remote diagnostics, alerts and notifications, APIs, on-device UX and accessibility, fleet-management capabilities, and enterprise integrations.
• Establish visibility into roadmaps, capacity, dependencies, risks, and release impacts across Culligan Quench, the Center of Excellence, and partner teams.
• Partner with Engineering and security and data stakeholders on architecture implications, security requirements, data governance, and technical tradeoffs.
• Define the IoT data-product roadmap and the machine, fleet, customer, commercial, and service insights required to improve business performance.
• Own requirements for fleet-health reporting, operator-facing analytics, customer-facing connected experiences, portals, enterprise data sharing, and performance dashboards.
• Use dispense patterns, field-failure data, product usage, and operational feedback to inform priorities and measurable success criteria.
• Define requirements for proactive service triggers and predictive-maintenance use cases in partnership with Service, Care, IT, Operations, and Analytics.
• Ensure connected-product initiatives include adoption plans, business cases, workflow implications, training requirements, and post-launch measurement.
• Establish a common operating cadence across Product, Engineering, the Center of Excellence, Novus, Service, Operations, Commercial, and other partners.
• Create clear decision rights, requirements-review practices, roadmap governance, sprint and release touchpoints, risk escalation, and executive reporting.
• Align delivery priorities with available capacity and enterprise priorities, and build evidence-based business cases when initiatives require broader organizational change or investment.
• Serve as a senior escalation point for connected-product requirements, partner performance, release risks, and cross-functional tradeoffs.
• Build trusted relationships across Culligan Quench, Culligan, and external partners while maintaining accountability for outcomes.
• Define the future-state connected-product operating model for 2028 and beyond, including what Culligan Quench should own directly and what should remain with the Center of Excellence or external partners.
• Develop the capability roadmap for dedicated firmware, cloud, data, quality assurance and testing, UX, and technical-product resources as scale and business cases justify investment.
• Help recruit, onboard, coach, and lead future team members and establish career paths and standards for connected-product work.
• Extend common connected-device practices across Twist, Purity, ice machines, and future products without creating category-specific silos.
• Promote reusable capabilities, including telemetry standards, diagnostics, alerts, integration patterns, release governance, field-feedback loops, and lifecycle discipline.

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressively responsible product-management, platform, software, IoT, or connected-device experience, including leadership at the director or senior-director level.
• Demonstrated ownership across the product lifecycle, from customer discovery and business cases through requirements, delivery, launch, measurement, sustaining, and lifecycle decisions.
• Experience working across software, firmware, cloud, connected hardware, data products, UX, APIs, fleet management, or operational platforms.
• Ability to translate business and customer needs into clear product requirements, priorities, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Experience leading external development partners, shared technical organizations, or complex matrixed delivery models.
• Strong executive communication, structured problem-solving, stakeholder leadership, and comfort operating through ambiguity.
• Demonstrated ability to build teams, operating models, governance practices, or organizational capabilities over time.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent relevant experience; advanced degree is helpful but not required.

Benefits

• Equity