# Director, Product Management **Company**: Cockroach Labs **Location**: New York, NY; San Mateo, CA **Work arrangement**: hybrid **Experience**: senior **Job type**: full-time **Category**: Engineering **Industry**: Technology **Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cockroachlabs/jobs/7918100?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply **Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_77a4f758-5e4 ## Description ## 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. ## Skills ### Required - Product Management - Leadership - User Journey Thinking - Evidence-Based Decision-Making - Written Communication - Cross-Functional Alignment - AI-First Mindset --- Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/cockroachlabs/jobs/7918100?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)