Principal Product Manager

A Principal Product Manager is a highly autonomous and empowered individual contributor. They have demonstrated mastery of product craft through an extensive track record of business impacts in which they led the end-to-end product lifecycle . They are capable of mentoring and/or directly managing up to one product manager, and are influential communicators who are seen as the face of their product by senior leaders. They are responsible for identifying, validating, and driving business impact for a high-complexity, high-impact business domain.  They internalize the company's strategy,  identify innovative product opportunities and solutions that can best support the company's goals, and drive high-quality execution to achieve business impacts. Key responsibilities for this position include building business plans using research and analysis that drive investment decisions, managing and developing junior product talent within or adjacent to their product area, and driving cross-functional alignment on prioritization and impact for their product initiatives.

How You’ll Do It

• Critical thinking & problem solving
• Develop 12+ month product strategy for their product domain (e.g., decision-making frameworks, systematic problem exploration, outcome definition and measurement) and coaches others on how to do the same
• Proactively recognizes when processes or goals are misaligned with the highest value outcomes, and takes corrective actions autonomously
• Understands technical fundamentals of how multiple product and/or business domains interact, anticipates potential conflicts or synergies, and takes action to mitigate risk or maximize value
• Defines and utilizes continuous systems for quantitative and qualitative feedback gathering, and regularly gets close to inspect user behavior and/or problems themselves
• Demonstrated track record of "first principles" thinking, and the ability to consistently distill complex decisions in terms of the underlying facts, assumptions, and logic.
• Driving execution and impact
• Optimizes speed-to-value by making complex product decisions with minimal oversight, acting as the primary product leader accountable for decision-making, quality-control, and results delivery for their product area.
• Identifies high-ROI product capabilities capable of significantly improving Pie's business performance through deep user understanding, domain expertise, and creativity.
• Develops systematic frameworks for exploring and validating product opportunities using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods
• Aligns their product roadmap with the highest-ROI business and end-user goals, and consistently delivers quantifiable impacts that are within projected value estimates
• Deep expertise and hands-on involvement in all levels of the agile software development lifecycle, including sprint ceremonies, story writing, backlog prioritization, roll-out and launch, continuous monitoring, and program management.
• People Management
• Participates in evaluating Product,  Engineering, and Design talent as part of hiring panels
• Regular meetings with up to one direct report, providing coaching, feedback, and guidance (1x1s, development meetings, problem-solving sessions, formal performance summaries)
• Influencing and Communication
• Builds high-trust relationships with senior leaders across the business and serves as a trusted advisor and thought partner
• Creates alignment around shared objectives and facilitates adoption of enabling work among other teams; monitors progress and proactively addresses misalignment
• Evangelizes a compelling vision for their product domain to educate and inspire buy-in across the organization
• Distills complex information across multiple domains into a synthesized, well-supported structure that informs and makes the case for action
• Facilitates or leads large cross-functional meetings with senior stakeholders up to Director-level with minimal guidance

The Right Stuff

• 10+ years overall professional experience working on complex business and/or technology problems
• 7+ years Product Management experience working in an agile software development lifecycle (SDLC) environment
• 2+ years Experience managing at least one direct reports performing product management work
• Advanced communication (written, verbal and presentation) skills, to deliver complex information effectively and align people with the needs of the project/team
• Advanced problem solving skills, able to manage complex situations with multiple layers, and resolve to solution anticipating needs now and into the future
• Advanced understanding of continuous product discovery methodologies, including interviews, ethnographic research, job shadowing, passive feedback collection (e.g., surveys, product usage analytics), prototyping, etc.
• Advanced awareness of workflow, and project tradeoffs to make decisions based on needs now and into the future
• Demonstrated ability to influence strategic direction across a broad coalition of peers, stakeholders, and senior leaders
• Advanced understanding of modern software development tools, processes, and architecture patterns; knows how to strike a balance between business needs and the scope of software engineering solutions
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple project deliverables, making decisions and understanding tradeoffs, and create processes for efficiency and effective product delivery for their team and broader cross-functional delivery coalitions
• Marketing Analysis skills and a mastery of the Industry and sharing white paper level information as necessary
• Mastery of quantitative analysis across all areas of the business
• High level skillset in program management tools, and project mapping
• High level technical skills and mastery of the industry to mitigate complicated issues and manage multiple complex deliverables simultaneously
• G-Suite Tools, Collaboration tools (slack is preferred), basic office machines, Atalassian SDLC suite (Jira, Confluence, etc.)
• Proficient with Looker or other relevant analytics tools

Last updated on Aug 22, 2024