Cognizant - Associate Director - Pricing

Role Overview: We are seeking a strategic and commercially driven Associate Director - Pricing to lead the organization's overall pricing strategy and drive sustainable revenue and margin growth. The role will own pricing governance, optimization frameworks, commercial strategy, and pricing transformation while partnering closely with senior leadership and cross-functional business teams. Key Responsibilities: - Define and lead the overall pricing strategy in alignment with the organization's revenue, growth, and profitability objectives. - Develop comprehensive pricing frameworks across products, services, customer segments, channels, and markets. - Own pricing architecture, price corridors, discount structures, commercial policies, and pricing governance. - Lead initiatives focused on revenue growth, margin expansion, price realization, and profitability improvement. - Drive advanced pricing analytics using market trends, competitive intelligence, customer behavior, historical performance, and business economics. - Evaluate pricing elasticity, willingness to pay, customer segmentation, and competitive positioning to identify optimization opportunities. - Lead pricing strategy for new products, services, market launches, and major commercial initiatives. - Establish standardized pricing methodologies and decision-making frameworks across business units. - Partner with Sales and Business leadership on large deals, strategic accounts, negotiations, and customized pricing requirements. - Work closely with Finance to develop revenue and margin models and assess the financial impact of pricing decisions. - Collaborate with Product, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Strategy teams to ensure consistent execution of pricing initiatives. - Build and maintain pricing dashboards, KPIs, performance reviews, and executive-level reporting. - Develop pricing scenarios and business cases for strategic decisions, including price increases, discounts, promotions, and product/package changes. - Identify pricing leakage and implement measures to improve price realization and commercial discipline. - Establish pricing approval mechanisms and governance processes for exceptional pricing and discount requests. - Lead periodic reviews of pricing performance and recommend corrective actions based on market and business changes. - Drive pricing transformation through improved processes, analytics, automation, and data-driven decision-making. - Mentor and develop pricing and commercial strategy teams, building strong analytical and business capabilities. - Present strategic pricing recommendations, insights, and business cases to senior leadership and executive stakeholders. - Stay updated on industry trends, competitive movements, customer expectations, and emerging pricing models. Required Skills & Qualifications: - 12 - 18 years of experience in pricing, revenue management, commercial strategy, business strategy, consulting, or a closely related function. - Strong experience in developing and executing enterprise-level pricing strategies. - Demonstrated expertise in pricing optimization, revenue management, margin improvement, and commercial analytics. - Strong understanding of pricing economics, price elasticity, customer segmentation, and competitive positioning. - Experience managing complex pricing structures across multiple products, markets, customer segments, or business units. - Strong financial and commercial acumen with the ability to evaluate business cases and profitability impact. - Proven experience partnering with senior Sales, Finance, Product, Marketing, and Business leadership. - Strong analytical capabilities with experience using data to drive strategic pricing decisions. - Excellent executive communication, presentation, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills. - Experience in developing pricing governance frameworks, policies, and processes. - Strong leadership capabilities with experience managing teams and influencing cross-functional stakeholders. - Ability to operate strategically while maintaining strong execution and operational discipline.