VP & General Manager LSW

As Vice President (VP) of the Legal Software BU (LSW), you will serve as a member of the LR Divisional Executive Team and be responsible for managing a full P&L for an approximately Euro 75 million pan-European software business operating across multiple European markets.

This role sets the vision, strategy, and operating plan to deliver profitable growth of legal software solutions.

This role leads LSW through a transformation from a multi-product, country-based operating model to a focused portfolio of three core product lines and a function-led pan-European organization, while delivering profitable growth, innovation, and operational excellence.

The VP sets the vision, strategy, and operating plan to accelerate growth, simplify execution, and bring differentiated legal software solutions to market faster through the adoption of modern technology and AI-enabled capabilities.

This role is accountable for revenue growth, profitability, market expansion, and organizational effectiveness, while leading the business through continued digital, AI-enabled, and operating-model transformation.

The VP serves as the BU owner of strategy and execution across Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, Operations, and Regional Leadership, ensuring scalable growth, strong customer outcomes, and long-term value creation. The role operates in a highly matrixed global environment.

Activities of the VP include general management of the business, creating vision, establishing business strategy, developing value proposition and overall product strategy for the Business Unit LSW, establishing standards and processes for LSW, overseeing and guiding the BU in the execution of company-wide strategies and tactics, leading the management team, driving growth and transformation, creating and maintaining a reliable system for measurement of business performance for all operations, directing budget development and administration, representing the BU in cross-organizational activities, maintaining performance standards while working remotely, and representing WK within the industry.

A critical aspect of the role is the ability to operate effectively within a complex matrix, partnering closely with DXG, GBS, HR, Finance, Legal, Communications, and other corporate functions to deliver integrated, enterprise outcomes.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Business & P&L Leadership

• Own and deliver full P&L accountability, including revenue growth, margin expansion, cost discipline, and forecasting accuracy.
• Lead the transformation from a fragmented product and country model to three key products with clear ownership and accountability.
• Define and execute a multi-year growth strategy aligned with corporate objectives and regional market dynamics.
• Establish and monitor KPIs, dashboards, and operating rhythms to ensure transparency and accountability.

Growth, Go-to-Market & Commercial Excellence

• Lead end-to-end go-to-market strategy, including pricing, packaging, segmentation, and channel optimization across European markets.
• Strengthen enterprise and mid-market sales effectiveness through disciplined pipeline management and value-based selling.
• Embed a strong customer-first mindset, ensuring products, services, and experiences are grounded in real customer needs and measurable outcomes.
• Identify and capitalize on new growth, product, and partnership opportunities across European markets.

Product, Technology & AI Enablement

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering leaders to shape a customer-led, innovation-driven product roadmap, including AI-enabled capabilities.
• Accelerate speed to market, leveraging modern development practices, cloud platforms, data, and AI to shorten innovation cycles.
• Ensure high-quality execution from concept to launch while balancing speed, scalability, security, and regulatory compliance.
• Promote data-driven decision making and responsible adoption of new technologies across the organization.

Organizational & Operating Model Transformation

• Lead the evolution toward a function-led pan-European operating model across markets.
• Act as a change leader, driving clarity, engagement, and momentum through periods of structural and cultural transformation.
• Clarify governance, decision rights, and accountability to increase speed, execution quality, and collaboration.
• Drive continuous improvement in processes, cost structure, and organizational effectiveness.

People, Culture & Leadership

• Build, inspire, and retain a high-performing leadership team capable of operating at scale across Europe.
• Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, inclusion, and growth mindset, aligned with company values.
• Develop future-ready capabilities, succession plans, and a diverse leadership pipeline.
• Demonstrate strong matrix leadership, influencing without authority and aligning diverse functional and regional stakeholders.

External Representation & Stakeholder Management

• Serve as a senior ambassador of the company with customers, partners, regulators, and industry bodies across Europe.
• Strengthen the company’s brand and reputation across European markets.
• Collaborate with global peers and corporate functions to advance enterprise priorities.

Success Measures

• Sustainable revenue growth and market share expansion.
• Gross margin and operating income improvement.
• Customer retention, satisfaction, and net revenue expansion.
• Successful execution of AI, product, and operating-model initiatives.
• Leadership bench strength and employee engagement.

Other Duties

• Ensure seamless collaboration and integration with DXG, GBS, HR, Finance, Legal, Communications, and other enterprise functions, embracing them as integral partners of LSW success.
• Represent the BU in cross-organizational and enterprise initiatives.

Job Qualifications

Education

• Minimum: Bachelor’s degree (or local equivalent) in Business, Finance, Marketing, or related discipline.
• Preferred: Master’s degree in Business Administration or related discipline.

Experience

Required

• 5+ years senior leadership experience (GM/VP level), with full P&L ownership in a software or technology-enabled business.
• Demonstrated track record in enterprise or B2B software, preferably SaaS.
• Proven success leading pan-European businesses with strong cultural awareness and sensitivity across multiple geographies.
• Strong background in product strategy, commercialization, and growth acceleration.
• Proven change leadership experience, including operating model and organizational transformation.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams spanning Sales, Product, Technology, Marketing, Operations, and support functions.
• Effective talent management including developing and acquiring professional-level staff in different functional disciplines and locations.

Preferred

• Experience leveraging AI, data, and modern technology platforms to drive innovation and growth.
• Multilingual capabilities and deep European market understanding.

Other Knowledge, Skill & Abilities

Core competency requirements

P&L & Commercial Leadership

• Seasoned general manager with full P&L ownership, strong commercial judgment, and a proven ability to drive sustainable, profitable growth.
• Demonstrates disciplined financial management, pricing and portfolio optimization, and data-driven decision-making to balance short-term performance with long-term value creation.

Enterprise Software & Technology Innovation

• Proven leader in B2B enterprise software with a strong SaaS mindset.
• Brings deep curiosity and practical application of modern technologies, including AI, data, and cloud platforms, to accelerate innovation and speed-to-market while maintaining quality, security, and regulatory rigor.

Pan-European Leadership & Cultural Fluency

• Experienced pan-European executive with a track record of leading complex, multinational businesses across diverse markets.
• Demonstrates strong cultural awareness, adaptability, and the ability to unify teams across countries while respecting local customer, market, and regulatory nuances.

Customer-Centric Growth Mindset

• Highly customer-focused leader who embeds customer outcomes into strategy, product innovation, and go-to-market execution.
• Consistently identifies growth opportunities through market expansion, product differentiation, and improved customer experience, fostering a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement.

Change & Transformation Leadership

• Credible transformation leader with experience driving operating-model, organizational, and product portfolio change at scale.
• Excels at leading through ambiguity, aligning stakeholders around a clear change narrative, and sustaining momentum through multi-year transformation journeys.

Matrix Leadership & Enterprise Collaboration

• Highly effective in complex, matrixed environments.
• Builds strong partnerships across corporate and functional teams such as Product, Technology, DXG, GBS, HR, and Finance and prioritizes enterprise outcomes over silos.
• Influences without authority to drive alignment, execution speed, and collective success.

General competency requirements

Forging purpose and vision

• Leads with a strong, unifying vision that resonates across the organization. Able to look beyond short-term planning goals to connect to market trends and longer-term customer needs.
• Demonstrates strong tech curiosity, the courage to act on innovation, and an aptitude for fusing technology and novel ways of working to identify and leverage emerging opportunities.
• Systems thinker, able to quickly survey and understand complex and dynamic systems and connect dots within the organization and externally.
• Demonstrates strong communication skills, able to motivate and inspire across diverse audiences.
• Effective at articulating a vision and advancing the company’s agenda and reputation.
• Sees around corners, thinks differently.

Delivering strategic results

• Has a system-level perspective but can also dive deep into details to surface risks and opportunities buried in nuance.
• Able to track and respond to shifting explicit and latent customer sentiment to pinpoint new opportunities and meet customer demand in novel, creative, and innovative ways with a test-and-learn approach.
• Can effectively identify and tap a broad internal network of experts to determine where to lean in, take risks, place bets, or hold steady.
• Brings a sense of urgency and assertiveness to hitting short-term financial goals while simultaneously driving a longer-term strategic agenda.
• Exhibits a strong enterprise mindset.

Leading leaders and culture

• Identifies, attracts, empowers, develops, and motivates top talent, including next-generation talent with future-ready skill sets that are important to complete the team.
• Skilled at leading teams, leverages a broad range of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives.
• Designs and fosters a culture built on trust, transparency, integrity, and mutual support.
• Builds strong, collaborative teams that prioritize the division and business unit over individual market and function.

Leading self

• Demonstrates a high level of agility, able to navigate ambiguity and change, pivoting as needed when conditions shift or new information is made available.
• Demonstrates strong curiosity, knows what they don’t know, able to ask the right questions and bring the right people together to mitigate risk and explore emerging opportunities.
• Remains calm, focused, and clear-headed under pressure.
• Has the integrity and courage to challenge status quo without jeopardizing core values.
• Demonstrates sound, fact-based decision making and exceptional judgment.
• Exhibits genuine caring for Wolters Kluwer, its legacy, future potential, people, and customers. Encourages truth-telling and honest feedback across all levels of the organization, modeling openness, curiosity, and fruitful dialogue around where improvements are needed and how WK can continue to evolve.
• Balances confidence with humility.

Travel Requirements

Frequent travel required to various locations and work in the field with customers and representatives.

Domestic and international travel to Group Business Units, customer sites, and/or industry events up to 35-40% of work time.

• Ability to travel independently.
• Must have valid driver’s license and passport.
• Ability to travel by air and internationally.