Director, Innovation & PMO

Empower Pharmacy·4d ago

Lead

Empower Pharmacy is a visionary healthcare company dedicated to making quality, affordable medication accessible to millions of patients nationwide. As the nation’s most advanced 503A compounding pharmacy and FDA-registered 503B outsourcing facility, we’re redefining what’s possible in personalized medicine and pharmaceutical manufacturing. We’re proud to be recognized as one of Houston’s fastest-growing private companies and ranked #116 in Healthcare & Medical on the Inc. 5000 List for 2025.

Our strength is built on four core values: People, Quality, Service, and Innovation. Guided by these principles, we’ve created a uniquely integrated healthcare platform powered by advanced technology, operational excellence, and a relentless commitment to patient care. From manufacturing and quality control to distribution and customer experience, our teams work together to raise industry standards, expand access to critical medications, and improve outcomes for patients and providers across the country.

At Empower, joining our team means more than starting a new role. It means becoming part of a mission-driven organization that’s transforming healthcare at scale. We invest deeply in our people, encourage bold thinking, and create opportunities for growth, leadership, and innovation at every level. Your ideas matter here, your development is supported, and the work you do has a direct impact on the lives of millions.

If you thrive in a fast-moving, purpose-driven environment where innovation, collaboration, and ambition come together, Empower Pharmacy is the place for you. Let’s transform healthcare together.

Position Summary:

The Director of Innovation & PMO owns the structure, velocity, and strategic ambition of the Marketing function at Empower Pharmacy. This role sits at the intersection of AI-enabled innovation, structured program management, and marketing experimentation. It exists to ensure the Marketing team executes against the highest-priority initiatives with rigor, consistently incubates ideas that drive incremental revenue, and launches programs that improve customer experience and brand performance.

This leader will build and govern the Marketing PMO, drive adoption of AI tools that improve speed and productivity across the team, and lead the design and launch of marketing experimentation programs. They report directly to the CMO and act as a force multiplier across brand, campaigns, content, demand generation, product and channel strategy.

The right candidate thinks in systems, executes with urgency, and has the commercial instincts to distinguish between experimentation for its own sake and innovation that moves the business forward. This role has no direct reports at launch but is expected to build and lead a team as the function matures.

Responsibilities:

Marketing PMO and Program Governance

Portfolio Ownership: Build and manage the Marketing PMO from the ground up. Own the full lifecycle of marketing initiatives—from brief through post-launch review. Maintain a live portfolio view that enables the CMO to prioritize, deprioritize, and redeploy resources in real time.
Roadmap Planning: Translate CMO directives and marketing strategy into time-bound, cross-functional roadmaps with clear ownership, milestones, and escalation protocols. Ensure the team is always working on the highest-leverage activities.
Cross-Functional Coordination: Serve as the integration point across Marketing disciplines and key stakeholder functions including Sales, Product, Customer Success, Legal, Regulatory, and Medical. Drive shared accountability and resolve misalignment before it creates execution risk.

Marketing Innovation and Experimentation

Innovation Pipeline: Build and steward the Marketing experimentation pipeline. Identify, evaluate, and advance ideas that improve revenue generation, customer acquisition, retention, or brand performance. Own the go/no-go framework for what gets resourced and launched.
Program Incubation: Design and launch structured marketing experimentation programs. Run experiments end-to-end when speed requires it; hand off to team members for scale when the model is proven. Ensure every program has a clear hypothesis, success metric, and decision point.
Channel Innovation: Identify emerging channels, campaign formats, and audience strategies that Empower has not yet activated. Bring structured test plans, not opinions. Convert what works into repeatable playbooks.

AI-Enabled Innovation

AI Workflow Design: Lead the identification and adoption of AI tools that make the Marketing team faster, more effective, and higher quality in their output. This includes generative AI for content and copy, AI-assisted campaign analytics, and automation of repeatable tasks across projects and programs. Build internal playbooks for responsible and compliant AI use in a regulated environment.
Performance Infrastructure: Build dashboards, KPIs, and reporting cadences that give the CMO and marketing leadership real-time visibility into campaign performance, pipeline influence, and channel effectiveness. Make data the default language of the team.
Capability Building: Evaluate, implement, and scale AI tools across the Marketing function. Develop team fluency in AI-assisted workflows and establish governance standards that ensure compliant, effective use across all marketing programs.

Strategic Leadership and Planning

CMO Alignment: Act as a force multiplier for the CMO by translating strategic vision into executable plans with clear owners, timelines, and success metrics. Surface risks and tradeoffs early to enable proactive decision-making.
Resource Prioritization: Maintain visibility into team capacity and initiative load across the marketing portfolio. Enable real-time reallocation of resources toward the highest-impact programs and away from lower-priority work.
Team Development: This role launches as an individual contributor but is expected to build and lead a team as the function matures. Identify talent needs, define team structure, and develop the case for investment as scope and results expand.

Execution and Accountability

Operational Rigor: Establish the operating rhythms, tools, and norms that enable the Marketing team to execute with consistency and speed. Ensure every initiative has a clear brief, defined ownership, and a structured review cadence.
Stakeholder Communication: Synthesize complexity into clear executive narratives and practical team-level direction. Maintain stakeholder confidence through transparent reporting, proactive escalation, and disciplined follow-through.
Outcome Orientation: Hold the Marketing team accountable to measurable results. Define what success looks like before launch, track performance against commitments, and ensure learnings are captured and applied to future programs.

Knowledge and Skills:

Deep expertise in marketing program management, innovation pipeline development, and structured experimentation in complex, regulated, or high-growth environments. Hands-on experience using AI tools to improve effectiveness, speed, and productivity across marketing projects and programs; able to evaluate, adopt, and build team capability around AI in a compliant, regulated environment.
Strong command of marketing experimentation methodology: hypothesis design, test structure, statistical significance, and scaling what works.
Proven ability to manage concurrent, cross-functional marketing programs—balancing scope, risk, and stakeholder alignment while delivering measurable outcomes.
Excellent written and verbal communication. Able to synthesize complexity into clear executive narratives and practical team-level direction. Comfortable operating in regulated industries and understands how to move quickly without creating compliance exposure.

Experience and Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree required; MBA or advanced degree preferred. 7+ years in B2B or B2C marketing, marketing operations, or strategy roles, with at least 3 years at a Manager level or above in a high-growth or regulated environment.
Demonstrated experience building or managing a marketing PMO, program governance function, or operational marketing structure. Hands-on experience deploying AI tools in a marketing or operational context, with specific examples of tools implemented and outcomes achieved.
Experience in a regulated industry required. Healthcare, specialty pharma, compounding, telehealth, or life sciences backgrounds prioritized. Track record of designing and running structured marketing experiments that produced measurable, scalable outcomes.
Proven cross-functional collaborator with experience working alongside Sales, Product, Customer Success, Legal, Regulatory, and Medical teams.

Key Competencies:

Customer Focus: Builds trust through customer-centric solutions.
Strategic AI: Guides responsible AI adoption and adaptation.
Optimizes Work Processes: Drives efficiency with continuous improvement.
Collaborates: Partners effectively to achieve shared goals.
Resourcefulness: Secures and deploys resources efficiently.
Manages Complexity: Simplifies and solves complex challenges.
Ensures Accountability: Delivers on commitments with integrity.
Situational Adaptability: Adjusts approach to shifting conditions.
Communicates Effectively: Tailors messages to diverse audiences.

Values:

People: Empowering people defines who we are.
Quality: Excellence in every product, every time.
Service: Serving others is our highest purpose.
Innovation: Advancing care through technology and discovery.

Employee Benefits, Health and Wellness:

We offer comprehensive benefits to support your health, well-being, and future, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, 401(k) matching, wellness perks, IV therapy, and compounded medications. Learn more: https://careers.empowerpharmacy.com/benefits/

Physical Requirements:

While performing the responsibilities of the job, the employee is required to talk and hear. The employee is often required to remain in a stationary position for a significant amount of the workday and frequently use their hands and fingers to handle or feel in order to access, input, and retrieve information from the computer and other office productivity devices. Employees are regularly required to move about the office and around the corporate campus. The employee is regularly required to stand, walk, reach with arms and hands, climb or balance, and to stoop, kneel, crouch or crawl.