Director, Product Management

Director, Product Management

Job Description

We're looking for a seasoned product leader to join our team as a Director of Product Management. As a key member of our R&D leadership group, you will lead the Product Management team and own end-to-end user journeys across our products.

About the Role

• You will be responsible for defining product strategies and portfolios of investments across your journeys, making explicit tradeoffs across user segments, product surfaces, and time horizons.
• You will own the picture of success for your area, including a North Star metric plus leading and lagging indicators that reflect real user progress, not feature output.
• You will lead a team of Product Managers (Staff PMs and/or Senior PMs) - their development, accountability, and craft.
• You will be responsible for deep customer and journey discovery, qualitative and quantitative, continuous and structured.
• You will create clear, concise Outcome Briefs (3 pages or less) anchored in WHAT, WHY, and WHO - not feature specs.
• You will maintain a living (now/next/later) roadmap that reflects reality, tradeoffs, and strategic focus.
• You will establish a PM operating rhythm for your area, including weekly triads, biweekly roadmap syncs, monthly insights reviews, and quarterly planning and reflection.

Responsibilities

• Define a clear product vision for your journeys that connects user problems to business outcomes, and translate it into a 12-month strategy and 90-day outcome bets.
• Drive evidence-based prioritization using frameworks like RICE and customer signals - making tradeoffs explicit, not implicit.
• Balance short-term fixes with long-term bets, ensuring the team is always working on the highest-leverage problems.
• Partner with Engineering on feasibility and tradeoffs - owning the WHAT and WHY; Engineering owns the HOW.

Customer & Journey Obsession

• Establish an ongoing rhythm of customer engagement: calls, support ticket review, field shadowing, and journey shadowing sessions.
• Define Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) and user personas across your journeys - developers, DBAs, SREs, platform engineers, AI engineers.
• Use AI to synthesize qualitative feedback, support tickets, and telemetry at scale - surfacing patterns, not just data points.
• Maintain a product backlog grounded in validated, quantified pain points.

Team & Craft Development

• Mentor and develop PM talent - elevating the consistency of craft, accountability, and outcomes across your team.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, continuous learning, and customer-first thinking.
• Set the bar for what great PM work looks like: Outcome Briefs that become models of clarity, roadmaps others want to follow, and insights that shape company decisions.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Drive alignment across Engineering, Design, Docs, Field, and GTM - building shared context, not just shared calendars.
• Partner with PMM and GTM to craft compelling launch narratives and post-launch success stories.
• Influence through data, clarity, and narrative - not title or escalation.

AI-First Product Development

• Identify opportunities to embed AI across user journeys - from schema design to observability to operational intelligence.
• Define AI Evals and measurable AI metrics for every AI-powered feature from day one.
• Embed AI tools in your team's day-to-day workflows: discovery, spec writing, synthesis, and roadmap planning.

The Expectations

• First 30 days: deeply understand our user journeys, the Developer Lifecycle framework, and the product areas you'll own.
• First 90 days: fully own your user journeys - running rituals, driving prioritization, and setting clear success criteria.

Requirements

• 8-12+ years of experience in Product Management, with 3-5+ years in leadership roles managing PMs.
• Proven experience in database, infrastructure, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, or distributed systems products.
• A track record of elevating PM craft and team output - not just managing headcount.
• Deep fluency in user journey thinking - owning end-to-end experiences across multiple surfaces (UI, CLI/API, Docs).
• Strong evidence-based decision-making: you use telemetry, NPS, RICE, and customer research - not instinct alone.
• Excellent written communication - our strategic product meetings rely on written docs, not slides.
• Demonstrated ability to drive cross-functional alignment through influence, data, and clarity.
• An AI-first mindset: in how you think about product experiences and how you operate day-to-day.
• Experience working in a SaaS, enterprise software, or open-core business model preferred.