Your opportunity

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.

In this role you will:

1. Lead the day-to-day execution of Schwab’s enterprise product governance process, managing the review pipeline, coordinating cross-functional stakeholders, resolving readiness gaps, and ensuring initiatives are prepared for timely and effective Product Review Committee decisions
2. Develop a high-performing team with the capabilities, judgment, and stakeholder influence needed to facilitate complex enterprise decisions
3. Own the strategic and operational execution of continuous improvement the Enterprise Product Governance by establishing scalable governance models that support future growth, acquisitions, platform expansion, and evolving regulatory expectations
4. Improve speed to market without compromising risk management by identifying process improvements, strengthening early stakeholder engagement, and establishing clear readiness standards
5. Manage, own, and drive adoption of governance resources, playbooks, training materials that improve consistency across product teams and increase business self-sufficiency
6. Lead evolution of governance reporting, metrics, and management information that provide leadership visibility into review pipeline volume, decision outcomes, emerging themes, capacity, and speed-to-market performance
7. Support regulatory examinations, internal audits, and governance reviews by maintaining strong documentation, demonstrating process effectiveness, and representing product governance practices to internal and external stakeholders

What you have

Required:

Over 8+ years of leadership experience with:

Enterprise process transformation

• 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.

Large regulated environment

• 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,

Executive influence

• 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.

Cross-functional leadership

• 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.

People leadership

• Direct people management experience is a must.

Preferred:

Large regulated environment

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

Governance tool expertise:

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