Principal Digital Product Manager - Formulation AI Activation

About the role

PPG: WE PROTECT AND BEAUTIFY THE WORLD™ Through leadership in innovation, sustainability and color, PPG helps customers in industrial, transportation, consumer products, and construction markets and aftermarkets to enhance more surfaces in more ways than does any other company. To learn more, visit www.ppg.com and follow @PPG on X. The PPG Way 2030 We are custome

Responsibilities

• Activation Strategy & Vision
• Define the enterprise activation strategy and roadmap for Formulation AI; set quarterly OKRs and success metrics for awareness, onboarding, enablement, expansion, and realized value.
• Translate scientific, operational, and commercial needs into activation requirements; articulate value propositions by persona and business context, including formulators, lab managers, process engineers, product managers, and senior functional leaders.
• Apply deep understanding of coatings technology, AI/ML, data ecosystems, and product activation to guide priorities, resolve unusually complex issues, and contribute thought leadership that advances the AI product discipline.
• Discovery, Product-Led & Change Management
• Lead product discovery for broad and ambiguous adoption challenges; prioritize hypotheses and run experiments, pilots, and lighthouse deployments to de-risk adoption and maximize value delivery to internal customers.
• Build and iterate activation playbooks (pilot designs, lighthouse labs, cohort rollouts), including training curricula, office hours, "champions" networks, and in-product guidance.
• Anticipate internal and external business trends, identify process changes needed for organization-wide adoption, and partner with HR/L&D, Communications, Legal, Compliance, and business leaders on enablement and change narratives.
• Data, Integrations & Governance
• Use analytics and advanced judgment to inform decisions across master data sources, data quality, integrations, and automation opportunities; establish telemetry for activation funnels, feature usage, value capture, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure model governance, compliance, safety, data access controls, provenance, auditability, and human-in-the-loop controls are embedded in activation motions and scalable operating procedures.
• Delivery & Backlog Leadership
• Define and prioritize user stories across multiple team backlogs aligned to the activation roadmap; determine methods and procedures for new or special assignments and maintain features/components that enable scale, including onboarding, guidance, feedback loops, and reusable activation assets.
• Review completed work and accept stories; exercise independent judgment in resolving delivery tradeoffs and ensure cross-functional testing plans and UAT for new features that impact activation.
• Stakeholder, Financials & Operating Model
• Build and manage senior stakeholder networks across S&T, IT, Data/ML, manufacturing, commercial, legal/compliance, and external partners; provide clear updates, manage expectations, and influence decisions throughout the lifecycle of activation initiatives.
• Own financial planning and value realization for activation programs, including capital requests, OPEX planning, spend-rate monitoring, partner SOWs, vendor performance, budget tradeoffs, and quantified ROI.
• Coordinate across IT, Data, ML platform, business, and vendor teams; identify and resolve dependencies spanning data scientists, ML engineers, developers, product teams, and business users.
• Coach, mentor, and formally uplevel employees with less experience; develop playbooks, training materials, and best practices that strengthen PPG's AI product and activation discipline.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or global equivalent in a related discipline required; Master's degree, MBA, PhD, or global equivalent preferred.
• 10+ years of increasing responsibility and complexity in digital product management, AI/ML product activation or coatings development.
• Background in formulations, materials science, chemistry, or process engineering.
• Experience leading scaled activation, change management, AI/ML adoption, and complex cross-functional transformation initiatives.
• Strong Agile/SAFe expertise.
• Willingness to travel 20-30%.
• How we work: At PPG, we bring teams together to accelerate collaboration and career development, with in-person work Monday through Thursday and the opportunity to work remotely on Flexible Fridays. Schedules may vary by location.

Benefits

Additional Information

PPG is scaling Formulation AI to transform how we design, validate, and commercialize coatings. As Principal Digital Product Manager - Formulation AI Activation, you will set the enterprise activation strategy, influence functional direction, and drive adoption across S&T labs, manufacturing plants, and adjacent commercial workflows. You will operate with substantial latitude on broad, complex, and high-impact initiatives. It requires advanced judgment, cross-functional influence, and the ability to create scalable solutions. These solutions shape our AI-enabled future.

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