Job Title: Senior Manager, Innovations and MEL
Reports to: Deputy CEO
Mode: Full time
Location: Mumbai
About FMCH : At the Foundation for Mother and Child Health-India (FMCH), we envision a malnutrition-free India. We aim to achieve this by delivering personalized, professional nutritional care to families during their crucial first 1000 days. Our focus extends to empowering frontline workers, including government Anganwadi workers, NGO partners’ staff, and our own frontline workforce, with training, tools, and data, enabling them to combat malnutrition within their communities.
Recognised for excellence, we've earned the CSR Health Impact Gold Award, won the Data4GoodExchange competition, and been part of the N/Core accelerator program and the esteemed Mulago Fellowship (2023).
About the vertical: The Products and Innovation team at FMCH is dedicated to creating transformative solutions to address malnutrition challenges in India. This involves innovating, developing, and scaling products that drive impact and facilitate integration into scaling mediums, including government systems.
Vertical’s Mission & Purpose:
Building Innovative Solutions for Malnutrition
The core challenge lies in conceptualising, developing, and sustaining tech-driven solutions to combat malnutrition at scale. It involves the entire product lifecycle, from ideation and creation to implementation.
Role Summary:
The Senior Manager – Innovation & MEL is responsible for strengthening the organisation’s ability to innovate, build scalable solutions, and use data and evidence to maximise program impact.
This role will provide strategic and operational leadership to conceptualise, develop, and scale technology-enabled and programmatic innovations, while holding robust Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning processes to inform organisational strategy and decision-making.
The Senior Manager will serve as a key bridge between organisational strategy, program implementation, and technology, ensuring that innovations are relevant, effective, and scalable through government and ecosystem platforms.
Responsibilities:
1. Organisational Innovation and Product Leadership
- Build and manage the innovation and product roadmap across programs aligned with strategic priorities.
- Identify and design scalable solutions that strengthen program effectiveness and enable scale.
- Guide strategic decisions on product investment, scale, redesign, or sunset.
2. Monitoring, Evaluation, and Organisational Learning
- Establish and institutionalise MEL systems to track program and product effectiveness.
- Enable leadership with data-driven insights to inform strategic and operational decisions.
- Strengthen the organisation’s learning culture and feedback loops across programs.
- Ensure innovation and program scale are guided by evidence and impact.
3. Product Development and Scale
- Oversee end-to-end development of new products from concept to launch.
- Ensure solutions are user-centred, operationally feasible, easy to scale, and aligned with field realities.
- Ensure capacity building of the implementation team to use the product as intended
4. Leadership and Team Development
- Build, mentor, and lead a small, specialised, and growing team (full-time and consultants), driving direction and innovation
- Define SLA for resolution of product issues and data requests, and ensure adherence of responses
- Strengthen internal capacity in product thinking, data use, and innovation.
- Provide leadership to cross-functional teams working on innovation initiatives.
Key Competencies
Advanced Proficiency :
- Process Management - Design and manage simple, effective processes that enable field teams to implement programs with consistency, clarity, and accountability.
- Analytical thinking and Data interpretation for decision-making - Use data and field insights to identify patterns, inform decision-making, and continuously improve program design and delivery.
- Communication, interpersonal skills and collaboration - Foster strong, respectful working relationships and collaborate effectively across diverse teams to achieve shared goals
- Results oriented - Maintain a sharp focus on outcomes, ensuring that all efforts are aligned with measurable impact and timely execution
- Team coaching and performance management - Support team members through regular coaching, clear goal-setting, and structured feedback to drive ownership, accountability, and continuous growth.
- Adaptive problem-solving in dynamic systems - Demonstrate flexibility and resourcefulness in navigating complex, changing field realities to arrive at practical, context-sensitive solutions
Proficiency (Should be capable and able to grow further):
- Technical credibility
- Strategic thinking and external awareness
- Influence and negotiation
- Innovative
Requirements:
- Minimum 5 years of experience in product development and management, and/or Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL), preferably within the public health or social impact sector.
- Demonstrated experience in conceptualising, designing, and implementing technology based solutions in complex, real-world environments.
- Experience working across functions and collaborating with diverse teams to develop user-centric and scalable solutions.
- Experience exploring or implementing AI-enabled solutions (such as automation or decision-support tools) in program or product contexts is desirable.
- High levels of ownership and an organised way of thinking and working
- Strong strategic thinking with the ability to connect functional work to organisational vision and priorities.
- High level of ownership with a proven ability to drive initiatives from concept to execution.
- Strong problem-solving abilities with systems thinking and a structured approach to decision-making.
- Knowledge about the first 1000 days and nutrition is preferred, not compulsory
What You’ll Gain:
- Scale Leadership Experience: Lead the scale journey through strategic pilots —design, validation, and expansion—across multiple districts and states.
- Team Development Skills: Build and coach distributed teams, gaining hands-on experience in people development and systems thinking.
- Systems Thinking & Adaptability: Navigate complex, real-world implementation challenges and drive decisions using data, field insights, and feedback loops.
Job Types: Full-time, Permanent
Pay: ₹60,000.00 - ₹100,000.00 per month
Benefits:
Work Location: In person
