Operational Excellence, Instrumentation R&D Lead

At Alcon, we’re passionate about enhancing sight and helping people see brilliantly. With more than 25,000 associates, we innovate fearlessly, champion progress, and act swiftly to impact global eye health. We foster an inclusive culture, recognizing your contributions and offering opportunities to grow your career like never before. Together, we make a difference in the lives of our patients and customers.

The Operational Excellence Leader strengthens organizational health and improves how a global Instrumentation R&D organization operates across three connected dimensions: processes and ways of working, product development performance, and culture. The role creates transparency, enables data driven decisions, simplifies high value processes, builds organizational capability, and leads improvements that increase speed, quality, predictability, and employee effectiveness. This role is on-site in our Lake Forest, CA location and a typical day would include:

Organizational Health, Ways of Working, and Culture Establish an organizational-health framework that provides insight into operating effectiveness, role and decision clarity, collaboration, change readiness, leadership follow-through, and employee enablement. Combine performance data, employee listening, stakeholder feedback, and operating observations to identify systemic barriers affecting execution and organizational effectiveness. Partner with leaders to translate organizational health insights into prioritized interventions with clear ownership, milestones, adoption measures, and expected outcomes.

Strengthen ways of working through clear decision rights, effective governance, disciplined escalation, simplified interfaces, and visible accountability. Build a culture in which teams surface problems early, resolve root causes using evidence, share learning, and sustain improvements without reliance on heroic effort.

Process Excellence and Product Development Acceleration Establish and maintain a product development excellence framework covering principles, standard practices, decision criteria, measures, and governance across the development lifecycle. Map end-to-end workflows and identify bottlenecks, rework, delays, avoidable handoffs, duplicative activity, and other sources of friction. Lead Lean and structured problem‑solving initiatives that improve flow, shorten feedback loops, simplify work, and increase reuse without compromising quality, safety, or regulatory requirements.

Identify and prioritize Operational Excellence initiatives based on strategic value, product development impact, feasibility, organizational readiness, and measurable benefit. Evaluate automation, analytics, digital tools, modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and other technologies that can accelerate learning, increase capacity, improve quality, and strengthen decisions. Pilot improvements, validate results, capture lessons learned, and scale successful practices across the global organization.

Product Development Performance Create an integrated view of development performance, including flow, decision latency, milestone predictability, quality, risk retirement, reuse, and launch readiness. Identify recurring issues across products and platforms, distinguish local execution challenges from systemic constraints, and lead cross‑organizational solutions where shared intervention creates value. Partner with product, technical, quality, operations, and launch‑readiness leaders to improve development outcomes while preserving their respective accountabilities.

Ensure improvement priorities are tied to measurable effects on product outcomes, organizational capacity, employee experience, strategic capability, and sustainable value.

Global Best…