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 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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…