SVP – Digital and Customer Platforms — Research-Tools Business

The mandate

A research-tools manufacturer has thousands of instruments operating in biotechnology, pharmaceutical and academic laboratories, yet its digital relationship with those customers is fragmented. Instrument software, analysis applications, e-commerce, technical support and service scheduling were built by separate product groups. Customers maintain multiple identities, entitlement checks delay support, and experiment files move through improvised workflows when scientists need to collaborate across instruments or sites. The group knows more about a shipped serial number than about the laboratory outcome it enables.

Management has debated two routes. One would continue funding product-specific applications, protecting local roadmaps and near-term instrument pull-through. The other would create a common platform for identity, entitlements, data movement, fleet visibility and reusable analytics, with product teams building differentiated workflows above it. Previous attempts to declare a platform produced architecture diagrams but no transfer of budget, authority or product obligations. The board will fund the transition only if it has a disciplined migration plan and customer evidence that recurring services solve real work.

The SVP – Digital and Customer Platforms will own that decision in execution. The remit combines digital product management, customer experience, platform engineering, data governance, cyber and privacy interfaces, commercialisation and the digital operating model. It encompasses roughly 350 internal employees and partners and a material multi-year investment portfolio. Success means fewer digital seams for customers and a better economic model for the company—not a forced redesign of every specialist application into one generic interface.

This is a Copenhagen-based executive role reporting to the Chief Executive or designated executive sponsor. The SVP will spend time in customer laboratories, product-development sites and service operations across Europe and North America. The business works with sensitive experimental information; trust, data boundaries and scientific usability must be designed into the platform rather than added at release.

Why this seat is open

The role is newly created because no existing executive owns the experience across instrument purchase, installation, scientific use, analysis, service and renewal. Digital teams currently report through several business units. The board has chosen to establish one accountable leader before approving the next platform investment and before technical debt makes migration materially more expensive.

What you will own

• Decide and deliver the common-platform boundary for customer identity, instrument entitlement, data exchange, fleet telemetry, support and reusable analytics, while documenting what remains product-specific.
• Lead approximately 350 employees and material partners across digital product, design, engineering, data and platform operations, with clear product-accountability and service-ownership models.
• Establish customer discovery with scientists, laboratory managers, IT and procurement, translating different needs into measurable workflows rather than an undifferentiated feature backlog.
• Create the migration and retirement plan for legacy portals and applications, including identity reconciliation, entitlement continuity, data export, customer communication and support.
• Own digital investment and recurring-service economics: development cost, cloud consumption, attach, activation, retention and contribution after service and commercial expense.
• Set governance for experimental, instrument and customer data, specifying consent, control, residency, secondary use and model-training boundaries with legal, security and scientific leaders.
• Integrate digital services with instrument launches, field service and commercial channels so teams sell and support one proposition rather than competing subscriptions.
• Build reliability and incident management appropriate to laboratory workflows, including recovery objectives for services that could interrupt experiments or regulated records.

The first 12 months

• Days 1–90: Observe priority customer workflows, inventory platforms and contractual data rights, and identify the identity, entitlement and data-movement failures causing the greatest customer effort. Set the product-versus-platform decision principles and stop duplicative investments that would deepen migration cost.
• Months 4–9: Launch the common identity and entitlement foundation for a bounded customer cohort, agree platform service levels and complete the legacy-retirement sequence. Reorganise teams around persistent products and services, introduce digital economics and conclude data-governance choices before expanding analytics.
• Months 10–12: Migrate the first complete customer workflow, from instrument registration through analysis and support, with measured improvement in completion and resolution. Prove one paid recurring proposition, publish the following year’s product-specific migrations and demonstrate a tested recovery process for critical platform services.

What the board will measure

• Reduction in customer identities, entitlement exceptions and support hand-offs for the first migrated cohorts.
• Activation, sustained use and paid retention of selected digital services, reported separately from software bundled without an explicit customer choice.
• Retirement of named legacy components and associated run cost, rather than addition of a common layer while all former systems persist.
• Platform availability and recovery against workflow-specific service levels, with material incidents transparently reported and recurrence actions closed.
• Data use demonstrably consistent with customer contracts, consent, residency and scientific confidentiality; no expansion into secondary use by assumption.
• Product teams consuming shared capabilities voluntarily because performance and usability meet their needs, alongside reduced duplicate engineering spend.

The person

You are an SVP or VP of digital products, connected platforms, software or customer experience in life-sciences tools, diagnostics, medical technology, industrial technology or scientific software. Across 22–28 years, you have moved a hardware-led portfolio towards connected and recurring services without losing the specialist workflows that made its products valuable. You have controlled at least DKK 750 million of annual product or technology investment and led at least 200 employees across product and engineering.

You have unified identity, entitlements and data journeys across acquired or historically independent products. You can describe a legacy product you retired, the customers you migrated and the economics removed—not only a new front end you launched. Experience serving laboratories or other technically demanding, partly regulated environments is highly relevant.

The board needs a commercially literate product leader. You can distinguish activation from adoption, bundled revenue from willingness to pay, and cloud gross margin from subscription headlines. You have negotiated data rights and can hold a precise conversation about customer control, model training, residency and incident responsibility without delegating every judgement to legal or cyber teams.

The position is principally on site in Copenhagen. International candidates may be considered with a convincing relocation plan and experience leading distributed European and North American teams. The SVP must be equally comfortable in a scientist’s workflow review, an architecture decision and a board investment discussion.

Compensation and terms

The expected base salary is DKK 2,550,000–3,500,000, plus annual incentive and long-term participation. Measures will combine customer workflow outcomes, legacy retirement, platform resilience, responsible data use and recurring economics. This is a permanent executive appointment with board exposure. Relocation support and treatment of verified forfeited awards may be included in final negotiations.

Confidentiality

The client, installed-base figures and product architecture will be shared only after the retained-search team has established fit and the required confidentiality agreement is complete. Candidates should not test the description with customers, distributors or former colleagues to identify the business.

Each response must contain no more than 49 words.