Deputy Director - Enterprise Service Management Virtual Agent Product Owner

Overview The Enterprise Service Management (ESM) & Knowledge Management (KM) organization has been established to define, implement and manage Service Excellence as well as Experience Excellence, supported by a strong Knowledge and Content Management discipline, across PepsiCo enterprise. From the organizational perspective ESM & KM is part of the Strategy and Transformation (S&T) organization but its remit goes beyond S&T, i.e. across all organizations providing internal services within Pepsico. The ESM Virtual Agent Product Owner (ServiceNow) will define, manage and communicate the product vision and strategy, ensuring alignment with PepsiCo business objectives and aligned to the broader omni-channel strategy for ESM and the PepsiCo Digital Employee Experience (dEEX). Digital Employee Experience (dEEX) is a broad initiative established in PepsiCo to transform how people interact with their workplace digital tools, allowing them to be engaged, proficient, and productive. In PepsiCo both office and frontline employees must use technology to do their jobs and hence dEEX is key to the overall employee experience. The focus for this role will be managing the product backlog and prioritizing features based on business needs and value realization. Responsibilities include collaborating with stakeholders, guiding the development team, and ensuring product quality and user experience through thorough design, testing and governance. Post-deployment tasks involve monitoring performance, analyzing metrics, and implementing improvements aligned with strategic goals. Additional duties include maintaining documentation, developing training materials, and providing ongoing business support. By ensuring data privacy and security, the Product Owner drives continuous improvement, ensuring the Virtual Agent remains effective and competitive in a rapidly evolving technical ecosystem. Responsibilities Define and communicate the vision, strategy, and design standards for virtual agent, ensuring alignment with business objectives and positive employee/user experience Manage product demand and prioritize backlog based on business needs, speed to value, technical feasibility, and user desirability. Build and maintain assets, such as reusable templates, to ensure consistency and expedite value delivery. These templates include, but are not limited to, a prompt library, behavior pattern library, word list, prompt guidelines and outcome +endpoint route mapping. Collaborate with key business stakeholders globally across the enterprise to gather requirements and be the liaison between business and the delivery team teams. Participate in discovery interviews with stakeholders and conduct user research. Oversee thorough testing ensuing consistent and acceptable level of performance from NLU or Taxonomy based chat interactions, ensuring product quality and adherence to compliance and security standards. Build plan for continuous improvement by leveraging ML tools for topic/intent modeling, evaluating available data and conducting API assessments, analyzing user research and call recordings (end to end) Drive governance and adherence to best practice standards in a federated model for requirements gathering and development. Manage vendor partnerships and ensure they are aligned to PepsiCo needs and meet value expectations. Develop training materials and provide ongoing support to all stakeholder groups. Ensure compliance with PepsiCo policies, international regulations (SOX, GDPR) and best practices for data privacy and security. Stay up to date with industry trends and emerging technologies to drive innovation and enhance virtual agent capabilities in line with industry best-in-class.. Present strategy, recommendations and solutions clearly and concisely and focus on key points to portray the intended message or purpose Effectively manage priorities, deliverables and timelines with little need for escalation Qualifications 6 to 9 years experience in relevant roles such as product owner, service design, experience design, service delivery, business architecture, development or process design with 2 to 4 years experience specifically in designing, configuring, or implementing Virtual Agent in ServiceNow. Enterprise level experience with Virtual Agent strategy and implementation Experience with writing, curating and testing conversation content to drive specific behaviors and align with business objectives Experience with intent architectures including entities and skills. Ability to troubleshoot NLU model performance and optimize to predict intent. Understanding of scrum principles and agile software development methodologies. A passion for understanding market trends, customer needs, and competitive landscape to shape the product strategy. Experience with Design thinking methods and UX design. Experience applying strategic frameworks to analyze complex business challenges. Ability to make business recommendations and successfully implement them across an organization. Ability to gain support for new ideas and align stakeholders. Organizational change Management experience is a plus. Prior experience in management, and in digital transformation consulting. Bachelor’s degree required; master’s degree preferred. Exceptional communication skills, written skills, and business acumen. Knowledge of Lean Six Sigma, or similar methodologies, a plus.