Job Description
Médecins Sans Frontières, international medical humanitarian association founded in 1971, provides medical assistance to populations whose lives are threatened: mainly in the event of armed conflict, but also epidemics, pandemics, natural disasters or exclusion from healthcare. The French section is present in around thirty countries
The position of Global Product Owner reports hierarchically to a selected rolling member of the LIGO Board, either from ICO, OCP or OCG, and is based within the HR or DSI department depending on whether the role is located in Paris or Geneva.
The role supervises the Solution Architect and the Tenant Administrator and is part of the shared tenant governance team, ensuring smooth collaboration and prioritisation between OCG, OCP and ICO.
The job purpose is to ensure that LIGO (Workday HRIS) delivers sustainable value aligned with MSF strategic objectives by providing overall program ownership, governance and strategic direction for the shared Workday tenant, coordinating entities’ needs, preserving system integrity and maximizing return on investment across MSF.
Tasks & Responsibilities
Global Program Owner will play a critical role in:
Strategic Alignment & Roadmap
- Prepare and inform decision-making of the LIGO Operational Body by analysing change requests, process evolutions, new projects, and Workday product developments, assessing impacts, risks, and strategic alignment.
- Define, maintain, and propose a multiyear LIGO roadmap, balancing competing demands from entities, identifying opportunities for enhancements and innovation, factoring interdependencies, and estimating resource and budget requirements.
- Communicate and cascade the LIGO vision set by the LIGO Board to global resources and ensure alignment and understanding across entities through the designated LIGO Focal Points.
Program Governance & Oversight
- Support and operate within the Tripartite Governance framework, ensuring that LIGO program decisions are prepared, documented, and aligned with agreed governance bodies and processes.
- Establish and maintain program management practices to control scope, priorities, dependencies, risks, and resources, ensuring alignment with overall MSF strategic objectives.
- Develop and maintain reporting processes and KPIs to provide the LIGO Operational Body (LOB) and LIGO Board (LB) with clear visibility on program status, risks, benefits, and performance, and actively participate in governance forums.
Stakeholder & Resource Management
- Act as the primary liaison across entities, functional, and technical stakeholders, ensuring stakeholder needs are understood, consolidated, and aligned with MSF strategic objectives.
- Manage globalized LIGO resources, including the Global System Administration and Solution Architect roles, and provide functional leadership to contribute resources such as entities’ Focal Points and reporting teams.
- Oversee vendor and partner management, including coordination with Workday and the TMA provider, and manage the Workday and TMA budgets in line with program priorities.
Benefits Sustainment & Continuous Improvement
- Lead Workday release and evolution governance, ensuring coordinated analysis of new features, impacts, testing strategies, and deployment decisions in collaboration with global and entity stakeholders.
- Oversee continuous adoption and enhancement initiatives to improve system performance, efficiency, and functional value, ensuring benefits are realized and sustained over time.
- Define and oversee testing and tenant management strategies, ensuring that changes are appropriately tested before production deployment and that system integrity is preserved.
- Ensure effective Level 3 support and capability development, promoting internal expertise, reducing dependency on external vendors over time, and increasing MSF’s value generation capacity.
- Enhance MSF reporting and analytics capabilities by supporting the development of reporting expertise and communities of practice, and by managing Workday subscription benefits such as the Workday Success Plan.
Profile required
Education:
- Tertiary degree or equivalent professional experience in HR, Information Systems, or related field
Experience:
- Proven leadership experience in complex multi-stakeholder environments
- Workday experience or formal training
Languages:
- English and French are the working languages necessary for this position.
- Minimum requirements for this specific position are French B2 & English B2
- Skills/ Technical competencies
- Strong knowledge of program and portfolio management approaches (predictive, agile, hybrid)
- Proven experience in implementing and/or managing Workday HCM solutions
- Ability to understand MSF’s organizational context and ways of collaborating and align technology opportunities with strategic priorities
- Strong program planning, prioritization, risk management, and monitoring skills
- Ability to set direction across multiple teams and motivate contributors without direct line management
Personal Abilities/Qualities:
- Commitment to MSF Principles and Values including MSF Behavioral Commitments
- Excellent ability to work in a multicultural environment successfully and to demonstrate commitment and support for diversity, gender-responsive, inclusive, and non-discriminatory behavior and attitudes.
- Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and negotiation skills
- Strong leadership in change management
- Analytical and critical thinking capabilities
- Ability to foster collaboration and integrate diverse perspectives across entities
Terms of employment
As this position is linked to LIGO, it may be hosted either by OC Geneva or OC Paris. The applicable contractual conditions will therefore depend on the section hosting the contract.
Full-time position: 100%
Open-ended contract
Working place: OC Geneva or OC Paris
Ideal start date: September 1st, 2026
Compensation and benefits: according to the remuneration policy and contractual conditions of the section hosting the contract
How to apply
Candidates are invited to submit their application exclusively through OCG recruitment platform, here: Médecins Sans Frontières Suisse - Global Product Owner
Kindly following these guidelines:
We reserve the right to close this vacancy earlier if we receive a sufficient number of quality applications.
At MSF, we value diversity and strive for an inclusive and accessible working environment. We encourage all suitably qualified people to apply, regardless of their ethnic, national or cultural origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, beliefs, disability or any other aspect of their identity.
MSF pays very close attention to the protection of the personal data of its members, staff and people wanting to join the association. The data collected in the course of your application will be processed in a fair and high quality manner, only by the staff in charge of recruitment, wherever in the world they may be working for an MSF entity. For more information on the processing of your personal data and your rights, please see our privacy policy.
Only selected candidates will be contacted.
