Associate Director, Digital Engagement Operations (Hybrid)
Merck · United States, Pennsylvania, North Wales Upper Gwynedd
Job Description
Job Description:
The Associate Director, Digital Engagement Operations is responsible for the day-to-day operational execution, delivery management, and cross-functional orchestration of assigned US Market web properties. This role operationalizes established digital engagement strategies, brand priorities, content standards, and channel governance frameworks into AI discoverable, compliant website experiences.
The Associate Director acts as an essential operational bridge among marketing teams, information technology, user experience/design, content publishing, analytics, legal, regulatory, medical review partners, accessibility discoverability specialists, and external agency teams. Within established strategic parameters, the Associate Director stewards assigned channel roadmaps, backlogs, and release sequencing, proactively surfacing risks and providing evidence-based recommendations.
Key Responsibilities:
Digital Engagement Operations and Delivery:
- Manage daily website operations and releases for assigned Healthcare professional, consumer, and business web properties.
- Turn approved brand strategies, business priorities, and digital guidelines into delivery requirements, release schedules, and execution plans.
- Maintain assigned channel backlogs and roadmaps, ensuring launch readiness, production quality, ongoing maintenance, and defect resolution.
- Weigh trade-offs among speed to market, technical stability, compliance, and user experience; recommend a path and execute approved decisions.
Capacity, Prioritization, and Operational Planning:
- Maintain clear status reports, dashboards, milestone tracking, and dependency logs.
- Proactively escalate resource bottlenecks, conflicting priorities, technical hurdles, policy questions, and portfolio trade-offs.
- Continuously improve workflows to increase delivery speed, quality, and predictability.
Governance, Standards, and Compliance Facilitation
- Facilitate adherence to metadata, taxonomy, structured content, accessibility, search and AI discoverability, and privacy standards.
- Support adherence to channel governance, brand guidelines, medical/legal/regulatory requirements, and quality benchmarks throughout production.
Cross-Functional Business Integration:
Partner with marketing strategy, brand, commercial operations, and customer engagement teams to turn commercial objectives into web execution plans.
Serve as the day-to-day operational point of contact across commercial, creative/UX, digital publishing, development, and review teams.
Lead alignment meetings, identify dependencies, clear execution roadblocks, and prepare escalation briefs when consensus cannot be reached.
Customer Experience and Performance Monitoring:
- Coordinate the implementation of approved website enhancements, functional updates, content clarity revisions, and search/discoverability improvements.
- Support the execution of pilot initiatives and testing plans, gather and synthesize operational data, and report findings to inform future scaling decisions.
Team Collaboration and Operational Discipline:
- Foster operational discipline, clear communication, accountability, and cross-functional partnership across matrixed delivery teams.
- Contribute reusable templates, best-practice playbooks, and process learnings to support the continuous improvement of the broader Digital Engagement operating model.
Points of Collaboration:
- Director, Digital Engagement: Direct reporting line; receives strategic direction, portfolio priorities, governance decisions, and budget allocations; escalates critical risks, resource bottlenecks, and policy trade-offs; presents operational recommendations for approval.
- AI-Ready Digital Engagement Innovation: Implements approved metadata models, taxonomy structures, content frameworks, and AI discoverability standards; provides practical operational feedback to help scale innovations.
- Brand and Commercial Marketing Teams: Aligns delivery plans with brand campaign calendars, product launches, regulatory label updates, and commercial objectives.
- Technology, Architecture, Publishing, and Analytics: Collaborates on technical requirements, user stories, CMS authoring, QA testing, release management, and performance measurement.
- Legal, Regulatory, Medical (MLR), Privacy, and Accessibility Teams: Coordinates submission packages, tracks review comments, and ensures all published experiences satisfy rigorous regulatory and compliance standards.
- Agencies and Third-Party Partners: Coordinates day-to-day task assignments, reviews deliverables, and tracks vendor delivery against contracted deliverables.
Required Qualifications and Experience:
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, digital communications, information technology, or a related field.
- Experience: Minimum of 5 years of progressive experience in digital marketing operations, web channel delivery, digital project/product management, or digital agency account management.
- Execution Leadership: Proven track record of managing complex web operations, releases, and content lifecycles across multiple brand properties or digital touchpoints.
- Planning & Prioritization: Demonstrated capability in translating brand briefs and digital strategy into detailed operational requirements, structured sprint/release plans, backlogs, and risk mitigation strategies.
- Matrix Collaboration: Strong experience facilitating cross-functional delivery teams spanning commercial marketing, IT, development, UX/design, analytics, and regulatory/compliance stakeholders.
- Technical & Channel Acumen: Working knowledge of enterprise Content Management Systems (CMS), web analytics tools, digital accessibility standards (WCAG), answer engine optimization (AEO) and discoverability, and quality assurance practices.
- Communication Skills: Excellent interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills with the ability to summarize operational challenges, synthesize trade-offs, and present recommendations to leadership.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Master’s degree or relevant professional certifications.
- Experience within the pharmaceutical, life sciences, healthcare, or another highly regulated industry.
- Familiarity with healthcare professional and patient web properties, gated/authenticated digital experiences, or CRM/marketing automation integrations.
- Working exposure to structured metadata, semantic schemas, taxonomy governance, or artificial intelligence/answer engine optimization principles.
- Demonstrated experience guiding and mentoring cross-functional peers and team members in a matrixed environment without direct reporting authority.
Required Skills:
Account Management, Business Integrations, Content Management Systems (CMS), Cross-Functional Teamwork, Customer Engagement, Delivery Management, Digital Marketing, Digital Publications, Direct Marketing, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Information Technology (IT), Innovation, Life Sciences Industry, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Strategic Thinking, Web Accessibility, Website Operations, Website Optimization
Preferred Skills:
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