Director, Product Development

Job Description

Sun Life Retail Advice & Solutions (RA&S) is one of Canada’s leading financial institutions that offers Canadians holistic advice and innovative solutions spanning insurance, health, and wealth through a continuum of digital-first hybrid advice, proprietary career, and independent sales channels. Within RA&S, Insurance Solutions is responsible for designing and distributing leading-edge life and health insurance products to over 2 million individual retail clients across Canada.

Reporting to the AVP, Insurance Product & Strategy, the Director, Product Development will be responsible for driving new product innovations and enhancements to our retail insurance new business product portfolio. The successful candidate will be accountable for leading a high performing team to execute on product initiatives spanning our life (term, participating whole life, UL, perm whole life) and health (critical illness, long-term care, personal health insurance) insurance portfolios.

The ideal candidate is a challenge-seeking, analytical, results-oriented leader with strong communication and influencing skills, a ‘get stuff done’ mentality, balanced with a strategic mindset to optimize decisions involving trade-offs between Clients, advisors, and shareholders.

What you will do?

Product Strategy – develop and evolve the strategy for individual products on the new business insurance shelf, with focus on driving business growth, leading the industry through innovation, and improving Sun Life’s market position

Product Development – drive product development initiatives from concept to implementation, including Client / advisor research, concept development and validation, business casing, oversight of build and go-to-market, and value realization. Develop next-gen insurance concepts based on technology trends, market direction, competitor actions and Sun Life’s strengths and assets.

Client / Advisor Research – leverage and champion design-thinking best practices to build creative solutions through empathy-driven, human-centered design. Lead the development and execute on of qualitative and quantitative research plans to bring forward the Voice of the Client and Voice of the Advisor to refine approach and proposed solutions

High Performing Team – lead a team of Innovation / Product Managers and build a diverse, empowered, best-in-class team through proactive career development and continuous feedback / coaching

What you need to succeed?

Minimum 5 years of related experience in the financial services industry, preferably in product management and / or strategy.

Get stuff done’ in a complex and challenging business environment

Highly developed leadership and influencing capabilities, ability to effectively manage relationships across the organization to deliver against objectives

Proven balance of analytical and creative problem-solving skills, ability to focus on the critical business issues in a data-driven and fact-based manner

Strong quantitative skills including data interpretation, model creation, and information visualization

Strong presentation and written communication skills with track record of working directly with senior leadership levels

Track record of developing and launching new solutions, with experience leading the design and / or delivery of solutions

Experience with financial and product performance analysis. A good understanding of the Canadian retail insurance landscape.

Experience with client research methodologies including design thinking, survey design and execution, and focus-group facilitation.

Ability to lead and develop a high performing team.

A university degree, post graduate studies in management would be considered an asset.

As this position is posted in several locations, we specify that bilingualism (French, English, both oral and written) is required for Quebec only for the frequent interactions with English and French-speaking colleagues or internal partners across Canada or worldwide.

What's in it for you?

• A friendly, collaborative and inclusive culture
• An environment of continuous learning and improvement
• Supportive working environment, culture of collaboration, high performance teams
• We’re committed to creating an inclusive and respectful environment. Our goal is to make sure all our employees have the chance to live up to their full potential
• Our unique Sabbatical Program gives you the opportunity to take up to 6 weeks off, every five years.
• We’re proud to be recognized as a company with a 2023 Most Trusted Executive team by Great Place to Work® Canada
• Sun Life ranked one of the 2023 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World on the Corporate Knights’ 2023