Director, Enterprise Product Governance (PL)

The Schwab Investment Platforms, Solutions, and Strategy (SIPSS) drives Schwab’s overall product strategy across established and emerging capabilities, and product acquired through mergers and acquisitions. As Schwab continues to accelerate the delivery of new products, platforms and capabilities to meet the expanding needs of our clients, the management and evolution of the processes that carry them from design to launch must keep pace. The product review process and committee are an integral component of enabling that strategy, responsible for ensuring products are risk assessed, ready to be platformed and distributed, and managed effectively over time.

The Wealth Product Risk & Governance team (WP R&G) within SIPSS, a first-line risk and governance organization, manages and facilitates the process to enable businesses to bring new products, offers, and capabilities to market efficiently while maintaining strong governance, risk discipline, and regulatory effectiveness.

This Director will lead and evolve the enterprise-wide product review and approval process used to bring new products and offerings to market. The role is responsible for evolving the "front door" intake process, reducing bottlenecks, increasing efficiency, and ensuring products move through governance and risk review without compromising regulatory requirements. The intake process acts as a centralized entry point and stratification for ensuring that appropriate due diligence and governance review are completed to bring products and offerings to the market.  

We are looking for someone who will bring a fresh perspective and challenge and evolve the legacy approaches rather than simply maintain the current process. The Director will lead and develop the team responsible for facilitating the current process, ensuring consistent execution, strong stakeholder coordination, and effective governance decisions. The role will also guide the team through implementation and adoption of new capabilities and process improvements as the future-state model evolves.

Over 8+ years of leadership experience with:

• Demonstrated experience redesigning, streamlining, or scaling complex enterprise processes.
• Ability to use data and management information identify bottlenecks and improve operational efficiency across multiple stakeholder groups.
• Experience building or improving governance, intake, approval, or review processes.

• Ability to translate strategy or policy into exec
• Experience working in a highly regulated enterprise scale organization.
• Sound judgment and confidence operating in situations involving ambiguity, competing priorities, and regulatory considerations
• Exposure to organizations governed by regulators and formal compliance requirements.
• Ability to translate strategy or policy into execution by establishing clear operating models, decision rights, standards, metrics, and implementation plans,

• Financial services strongly preferred, but other heavily regulated industries could be relevant.

• Ability to influence senior leaders without direct authority.
• Comfortable navigating competing priorities between business, risk, legal, compliance, and operational stakeholders.
• Strong executive presence and communication skills.

• Proven ability to coordinate across large matrixed organizations.
• Skilled at bringing groups together and driving outcomes through influence rather than ownership of the underlying work.

• Direct people management experience is a must.

• Experience with governance technology, workflow tools, or process automation would be a valuable preferred qualification