Associate Director / Senior Manager, AI Product & Business Partner - Marketing

Associate Director / Senior Manager, AI Product & Business Partner - Marketing

Position Responsibilities:

1. Domain Leadership & Strategy

• Lead the Marketing Domain Squad and act as the primary AI partner to Marketing leadership.
• Develop and maintain the Marketing AI and analytics roadmap aligned with business strategy, customer priorities, and growth objectives.
• Identify and prioritize high-value AI and analytics use cases across customer acquisition, engagement, personalization, campaign management, content development, and marketing operations.
• Partner with senior Marketing stakeholders to define opportunities, investment priorities, success metrics, and expected business outcomes.
• Establish a culture of data-driven decision making across Marketing functions.
• Align the Marketing AI roadmap with related initiatives across Distribution, Customer Experience, and other business domains.

2. Business Partnership

• Build strong relationships with Marketing executives, customer strategy leaders, campaign teams, channel owners, and other relevant business stakeholders.
• Translate marketing and customer challenges into clearly defined AI and analytics opportunities with measurable value realization plans.
• Act as a trusted advisor to Marketing leaders on AI, advanced analytics, Generative AI, personalization, and emerging marketing capabilities.
• Provide clear recommendations on how data and AI can improve customer targeting, engagement, conversion, and marketing effectiveness.
• Lead executive-level discussions on AI priorities, investment requirements, delivery progress, risks, adoption, and expected business impact.

3. AI Product Ownership & Value Realization

• Own the Marketing AI product portfolio and roadmap.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of AI and analytics initiatives from opportunity identification and product definition through deployment, adoption, and ongoing improvement.
• Work closely with Marketing and Technology stakeholders to define product vision, business requirements, customer needs, success metrics, and delivery priorities.
• Maintain and prioritize the Marketing AI product backlog based on business value, customer impact, delivery feasibility, data readiness, and risk.
• Ensure AI solutions are embedded into marketing processes, customer journeys, campaign workflows, and decision-making practices.
• Define and track KPIs covering adoption, campaign performance, conversion, customer engagement, productivity, revenue contribution, and return on marketing investment.
• Drive realization of tangible business benefits and communicate progress and outcomes to senior management.
• Gather feedback from business users and use performance data to continuously improve AI products after deployment.

4. Advanced Analytics & AI Solutions

• Apply advanced analytics, machine learning, and Generative AI to address Marketing business challenges, including:
  • Customer segmentation and audience identification
  • Propensity, response, and conversion modelling
  • Next-best-action and next-best-offer recommendations
  • Personalized customer engagement and communications
  • Campaign targeting and performance optimization
  • Lead generation, qualification, and prioritization
  • Customer lifecycle and behavioural analytics
  • Cross-sell and upsell opportunity identification
  • Customer retention and persistency improvement
  • Marketing attribution and effectiveness measurement
  • AI-assisted content development and localization
  • Customer and market insight generation
  • Marketing workflow and productivity enhancement
• Ensure analytical approaches and AI outputs are appropriate for the business objective and can be translated into practical actions.
• Assess emerging AI capabilities and identify opportunities to reuse and scale successful solutions across Marketing and other business domains.

5. Customer Data & Measurement

• Partner with Data, Marketing, and Technology teams to identify the customer data required to support Marketing AI products and analytical use cases.
• Support the development of consistent customer definitions, segmentation approaches, customer features, and measurement frameworks.
• Define appropriate testing and measurement approaches, including controlled experiments, campaign test-and-learn frameworks, and performance tracking.
• Ensure marketing recommendations and models are evaluated against clear business baselines and measurable outcomes.
• Work with relevant stakeholders to address data quality, accessibility, consent, and usability issues that may affect delivery or adoption.

6. Governance & Risk Management

• Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, model governance standards, responsible AI principles, data privacy requirements, and enterprise AI controls.
• Partner with Risk, Compliance, Legal, Data Privacy, and Technology teams to ensure appropriate oversight throughout the AI solution lifecycle.
• Ensure appropriate controls are applied to customer targeting, personalization, AI-generated content, and customer communications.
• Support model validation, performance monitoring, outcome tracking, and ongoing governance activities.
• Identify and manage risks relating to customer data usage, consent, explainability, fairness, brand reputation, and the accuracy of AI-generated outputs.
• Ensure AI solutions operate within approved business, regulatory, and ethical boundaries.

7. Squad Leadership

• Lead a Marketing Domain Squad comprising data scientists and AI engineers, together with relevant cross-functional delivery partners, to deliver measurable business outcomes.
• Set clear squad priorities and drive planning, resource allocation, execution, and performance management against the Marketing AI roadmap.
• Provide business context and strategic direction to ensure technical solutions address genuine Marketing and customer needs.
• Foster close collaboration between Marketing stakeholders, data scientists, AI engineers, Technology teams, and other delivery partners.
• Remove delivery barriers and facilitate timely business decisions, stakeholder alignment, and issue resolution.
• Promote a culture of customer focus, business value realization, disciplined execution, and continuous improvement.
• Develop squad capabilities in AI, advanced analytics, AI product management, and business consulting while creating a high-performing delivery environment.
• Support knowledge sharing and reuse of data, models, components, and delivery practices across domain squads.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, Marketing Analytics, Economics, Business Analytics, Actuarial Science, or a related discipline.
• Master's degree in a relevant field preferred.
• 8+ years of experience in AI, data science, advanced analytics, marketing analytics, customer analytics, digital product management, or a related field.
• Proven track record of partnering with senior Marketing and business leaders and influencing strategic decisions.
• Experience leading cross-functional squads or teams delivering AI, analytics, marketing technology, or digital products.
• Demonstrated success delivering AI or analytics solutions that generated measurable improvements in customer engagement, campaign effectiveness, conversion, productivity, or revenue.
• Experience managing a portfolio or roadmap of data, analytics, or AI products from prioritization through adoption and value realization.
• Previous experience within life insurance, wealth management, banking, financial services, telecommunications, retail, or another customer-focused industry strongly preferred.
• Experience in life insurance marketing, customer engagement, or distribution-related analytics would be an advantage.
• Strong understanding of customer segmentation, targeting, personalization, campaign management, customer lifecycle management, and marketing performance measurement.
• Ability to connect AI and analytics initiatives to customer outcomes, revenue growth, marketing productivity, and return on investment.
• Strong understanding of digital and non-digital customer engagement channels.
• Experience working with customer data, marketing platforms, customer relationship management systems, or marketing automation tools.
• Strong commercial acumen and understanding of how Marketing contributes to customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and business growth.
• Ability to balance customer needs, business priorities, delivery feasibility, and governance requirements.
• Strong understanding of machine learning, predictive analytics, customer analytics, optimization techniques, and statistical modelling.
• Experience with Generative AI, LLMs, AI agents, and enterprise AI solutions.
• Understanding of common marketing analytics techniques, including propensity modelling, recommendation models, clustering, attribution, experimentation, and uplift measurement.
• Working knowledge of Python, SQL, and modern analytics platforms.
• Experience working with large-scale customer, behavioural, campaign, and enterprise datasets.
• Strong understanding of AI governance, model risk management, data privacy, and responsible AI practices.
• Ability to evaluate analytical outputs and challenge technical teams on methodology, assumptions, performance, and business relevance.
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business language for executive and non-technical audiences.
• Strategic thinking and strong commercial acumen.
• Customer-focused and outcome-oriented mindset.
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills.
• Excellent communication and executive presentation skills.
• Ability to lead data scientists, AI engineers, and cross-functional delivery partners in a matrixed environment.
• Strong execution focus with a demonstrated ability to deliver measurable business value.
• Ability to balance strategic roadmap ownership with practical delivery leadership.
• Sound judgement when managing customer, regulatory, data, and reputational considerations.
• Self-starter with a passion for driving customer and marketing transformation through AI.

When you join our team:

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.
• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.
• As part of our global team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see.

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact hr@manulife.com .

Working Arrangement