Product Operations Manager

***We are unable to work with 3rd-party or corp-to-corp candidates for this position***

Product Operations Manager
Our client will be hiring a Product Operations Manager. This role is part tactical leader and part strategist, expect to lead the Product team’s effort in establishing and optimizing the internal processes, tools, and structures used to plan, build, release and communicate about our products. This role serves as a bridge between our Product and Engineering teams, constantly evaluating and delivering plans that capture the needs of both teams, keeping us aligned and driving growth. This role understands highly technical concepts and how to break them down for different audiences, delivering product knowledge and context in the language appropriate for each team. Ultimately, this role will visualize the Product team as “the product,” finding ways to internally improve the value created by the team. 
 
This role reports directly to the Director of Product Management and has no direct reports.
 
Responsibilities:

• Develop an understanding of adjacent teams within the organization and the underlying systems that drive their work
• Using deep knowledge of SaaS development practices, set a new standard of excellence by enabling the Product & Engineering teams to continuously improve the product planning and development processes 
• Support the design of, and own core execution of operational frameworks and processes for the product-engineering interface such as: annual and quarterly roadmap planning, research and experimentation, status reviews, product showcases, team onboarding and continued education, and go-to-market`
• Utilizing strategic thinking, technical expertise, and tactical leadership, work closely with the Product and Engineering teams to understand and manage competing development priorities, feature-level scope, functionality and timing, parlaying that understanding into improved partnerships between Product and Engineering as well as other internal teams
• Informed by feedback from technical stakeholders, works closely with the VP of Product and Product Managers to create and track quarterly objectives, triage issues, continuously improve product release readiness, and to launch new features, updates, and fixes
• Collaborate with project leads and stakeholders to ensure the team is delivering against program expectations and the product roadmap
• Partner with Product Managers to enable the business for upcoming product releases
• Own and manage development projects/releases related to our ongoing operational readiness stance, including billing, subscription management, and regulatory compliance (such as SOC2, GDPR, CCPA)
• Run weekly backlog reviews, and other ritual meetings with engineering teams
• Track product development KPIs, benchmarks, expectations and ensure adherence and clear communication across business lines; ensure Product and Engineering teams have the data needed to understand team capacity in order to facilitate future release schedule planning 
• Own the management, adoption, and improvement of our tools and processes and support standardization of execution process across the organization
• Coordinate our highest priority cross-team product initiatives, keeping teams accountable to their milestones, elevating, resolving barriers to achieving our outcomes, and ensuring transparency in our communications to the broader organization
• Build tight communication and feedback loops with our cross-functional partners for our product roadmap, bugs, feature requests, and incidents
• Align product deliverables / releases to strategic goals while ensuring we are able to maintain delivery to existing customers
• Eventually, this role will build programs for gathering, synthesizing, and reporting on product feedback and for tracking and reporting on feature adoption so that product managers can better understand product users

 
Qualifications:

• 3+ years of SaaS experience required; 6+ years preferred
• Relevant experience in product operations, program/project management, product management or a similar role preferred
• Experience working in a growing company in an emerging area, where processes are evolving
• Deep understanding and demonstrated use of standard product discovery and development methodologies, (e.g. agile scrum, Kanban)

 
Other:

• Proven track record of designing and executing transformative programs with heavy cross-functional go-to-market collaboration – including processes and systems to support predictability and goal accomplishment
• Demonstrated experience in product delivery and engineering best practices
• Successfully worked with engineering teams in defining, planning, and executing against a product roadmap
• Strong track-record of delivering and influencing product decisions
• Proven experience owning and improving technical products
• Comfortable coordinating execution and managing expectations across a diverse team with many internal and external dependencies
• Demonstrated ability to flex from strategic work to tactical work with agility
• Ability to influence and affect change at all levels of an organization
• Seeks to understand first, makes data-driven decisions, has willingness to take risks and a deep sense of ownership and accountability
• Bias toward simplicity – applying the minimal necessary structure and process, and keeping the internal stakeholder experience in mind
• Empathy and flexibility – understanding how to thoughtfully navigate the different work practices and contexts of various stakeholders and implement programs skillfully