Director, Product Innovation & Strategy

Overview

About the Role:

The Director, Product Innovation and Strategy provides visionary leadership and strategic direction to define, build, and scale Knauf’s product and innovation agenda across North America. This leader is responsible for shaping the long-term product innovation strategy that drives profitable growth, market differentiation, and customer-centric solutions across channels and segments. The position will connect global strategy to local execution, influence overall commercialization priorities, identify breakthrough growth opportunities, and create business cases that align customer insights, technology trends, and manufacturing capabilities into sustainable, margin-accretive solutions aligned to company strategies and priorities.

Product Innovation

• Creates a high-performance innovation engine that links market and customer needs to product roadmaps, leveraging building science, sustainability, and advanced materials expertise.
• Fosters an innovative mindset that allows for new methods, while keeping safety as the number one priority.
• Develops new products across multiple product categories and throughout all phases of product development, including ideation and scoping, manufacturing, validation, and launch, while considering important technical and sustainability issues.
• Partners cross-functionally with Building Science, Global Product Management, and Centers of Excellence to deliver innovations that advance Knauf’s sustainability and circularity goals.
• Helps identify, develop, test, and commercialize products in new or existing market segments. Owns the product strategy for our light commercial, residential, commercial, and industrial markets.
• Integrates voice-of-customer insights and competitive intelligence to prioritize innovation pipelines with measurable ROI, margin expansion, and strategic fit.

Product Management

• Through a deep understanding of the go-to market opportunities and business requirements, translates these needs and through processes, ensures the most cost effective, dependable solution is provided.
• Establishes a world-class product management framework aligned with strategic priorities, emphasizing portfolio discipline, pricing excellence, and lifecycle optimization.
• Brings new products to market by analyzing proposed product requirements and product development programs, preparing ROI analysis, creating business case and comprehensive plan.
• Drives stage-gate governance, SKU rationalization, and lifecycle management to ensure resources are invested in the highest-value opportunities.
• Optimizes product line offerings by redesigning processes from manufacture to field applications.
• Manages profitable SKU mix to include: recommending the mix and scope of present and future product lines by reviewing product specifications and technical requirements, appraising new product ideas, developing product roadmaps, and competitive offering reviews.
• Partners with commercial, manufacturing, and supply chain teams to connect innovation to operational efficiency, digital enablement, and channel growth.
• Ensures regular product comparison audits are completed.

Strategic Product Planning

• In partnership with internal stakeholders, drives sustained revenue, market share and margin growth through development and implementation of effective annual and multi-year strategies.
• Leads the annual long-range product and innovation strategy, linking global and regional priorities into actionable investment roadmaps.
• Establishes portfolio strategies that balance core product stewardship with breakthrough innovation and diversification into adjacent categories.
• Develops improved positioning of the company’s products through sound business case, value proposition and marketing strategy.
• Effectively translates business strategies into product strategies, winning roadmaps and product specifications that meet revenue, profitability and customer satisfaction goals.
• Manages cross-functionally to deliver programs on-time and at-cost.
• Shapes and communicates the product vision enterprise-wide, ensuring that innovation is measurable, repeatable, and customer-led.
• Drives gathering of local market…