Connected-Equipment Digital Services Portfolio Director

The mandate

An industrial-automation manufacturer has connected more than 70,000 customer assets through separate product-line initiatives, but it cannot yet operate those connections as a coherent services business. Customers see inconsistent entitlement, alarm quality and remote-support experiences; field teams distrust predictions that do not reflect maintenance reality; and finance cannot reconcile software revenue, service cost and warranty avoidance at installed-base level. The executive committee has created a permanent portfolio seat to turn technically credible pilots into services that customers adopt, renew and permit inside production environments.

The director will hold continuing global accountability for remote monitoring, predictive-maintenance offers, digital service contracts, the industrial-IoT platform and the portfolio mechanisms linking equipment product groups to lifecycle service. This includes a revenue and investment envelope, proposition choices, platform priorities, commercial launch governance, telemetry permissions, service-operating design and country adoption. The post is not a finite transformation office: after the first platform and proposition decisions, the director remains accountable for renewal quality, service margin, installed-base penetration and the next investment cycle.

Within the board-approved plan, the director may stop or retire digital offers, allocate product and engineering capacity, set minimum launch evidence, change service entitlements, choose build-versus-partner paths and approve programme commitments up to €4 million. Material acquisitions, annual capital beyond the agreed envelope, customer-data policy changes, workforce restructuring and safety-critical control releases require executive or statutory approval. Equipment engineering retains product-safety authority; regional presidents own local commercial execution; cybersecurity retains independent control acceptance.

By the end of the first year, the company expects one portfolio taxonomy and P&L view covering at least 90% of connected-service revenue, three priority offers operating on common entitlement and telemetry foundations, and a 15% improvement in renewal or expansion among the agreed customer cohorts. The director must also cut unactionable predictive alerts by at least 30%, raise remote resolution for selected service events by ten percentage points, establish field adoption in four anchor markets, and present a funded three-year path to double-digit digital-service margin. Baselines will be independently agreed in the first ninety days rather than reverse-engineered to flatter delivery.

Success requires respect for domain boundaries. A leader from payments, banking or another regulated digital environment may bring unusually strong portfolio governance, multi-market launch discipline, cloud migration and customer-journey instincts, but will not be treated as an industrial expert by assertion. The appointment must learn asset criticality, edge constraints, installed-base economics and field-service practice quickly, while relying on accountable engineering and safety specialists. Manufacturing execution replacement, core equipment redesign and direct ownership of the global field workforce are outside the role.

Why this seat is open

Connected-service activity grew inside individual automation businesses, leaving no executive with end-to-end economic and customer accountability. A recent portfolio review found strong engineering assets but duplicated platforms, weak adoption evidence and no common renewal discipline. The company is making a permanent appointment because operating the service portfolio after consolidation matters as much as completing the initial transformation, and it wants the leader installed before the next annual investment cycle.

What you will own

• Segment the connected installed base by customer outcome, asset criticality, connectivity, serviceability and economic potential, then choose where the company will and will not build digital offers.
• Establish a portfolio P&L that reconciles subscriptions, bundled entitlements, service labour, cloud consumption, channel economics, warranty effects and product-line transfers at offer and customer-cohort level.
• Decide the common capabilities for identity, entitlement, device onboarding, telemetry, alerting, case orchestration and customer visibility while preserving equipment-specific logic that genuinely differentiates performance.
• Redesign predictive-service releases around precision, actionability, technician trust and avoided downtime, closing models whose alerts merely create inspection work without customer value.
• Align digital journeys with dispatch, parts, remote experts and field-service incentives so that a platform signal changes the resolution path rather than stopping at a dashboard.
• Govern market launches through customer permission, cybersecurity, data residency, sales readiness, service capacity, pricing, adoption and renewal evidence across four anchor countries.
• Build and lead the permanent portfolio organisation, setting product accountabilities, succession depth, investment forums and a three-year roadmap tied to recurring revenue and margin quality.

Candidate qualifications

• Led a global digital product or technology portfolio of at least USD25 million equivalent across multiple markets, with measurable growth, adoption, conversion or renewal outcomes.
• Converted fragmented product initiatives into common platform capabilities and governed migration without allowing local regulatory or customer needs to become uncontrolled divergence.
• Owned commercial and operational outcomes for a digital service, platform or recurring-revenue proposition, not solely delivery milestones and technology spend.
• Directed cloud, data and customer-journey change through control-heavy environments and can translate technical dependencies into executive investment decisions.
• Demonstrates credible exposure to industrial IoT, connected products, asset-intensive services or field operations; applicants without it must show how they closed an equally material domain gap.
• Led international teams and senior stakeholders across Europe, Asia and the Americas while retaining direct accountability for portfolio choices and benefits realisation.

Non-negotiables

• Will base in Munich under the stated hybrid pattern and undertake up to 30% planned travel to product, customer and service locations.
• Can provide quantified evidence of digital revenue, adoption, renewal, conversion or operating improvement across a multi-market portfolio of comparable scale.
• Is candid about any gap in industrial-IoT architecture, installed-base economics or field-service operations and presents a specific first-90-day learning plan.
• Accepts enduring portfolio, people and economic accountability beyond the first transformation milestones, including offers that must be stopped rather than celebrated.

1. 49 words maximum. Which digital portfolio did you own, what was its investment scale, how many markets did it serve, and what changed in revenue, adoption, conversion or renewal?
2. 49 words maximum. Describe your closest exposure to connected equipment, industrial IoT or field service; name the domain gap you would still need to close.
3. 49 words maximum. Give one example where platform evidence caused you to stop, combine or materially reposition a digital proposition despite senior sponsorship.