Director of Product Management

The Opportunity:

athena’s developer platform is at the core of our business today, and its future. We’re looking for an experienced product leader to simplify the R&D employee experience, including developers, product managers, UX, analytics, operations, and more. Key innovation opportunities include leveraging artificial intelligence and integrating third party applications to design and transform our product delivery process.

Criteria for a top candidate include a Chennai-based, dynamic, customer-oriented product leader to drive business outcomes, R&D (Product, UX, Engineering) service experience, and technical product management outcomes. Candidates for the role will be equally passionate about technology serving colleagues as customers, and realizing through the impact our tech strategy to our customer and user experience.

This role will face-off extensively with product and engineering leadership and be held accountable for business outcomes of our tech stack – productivity, scalability, stability, and security, in partnership with several leaders around the business.

Position Summary:

The Director of Product Management will act as holistic owner of the R&D experience portfolio. Responsibilities will include building the product vision; engaging with the customer and user base to identify and represent the users of the product; making tradeoffs; and setting the priorities for R&D resource allocation.

The Director will lead a team of Product Owners across 8 scrum teams and work closely with Engineering and UX counterparts, in addition to collaborating with Infrastructure, Information Security, the broader R&D organization, and vendors to ensure product success. This team will be charged with successfully understanding and responding to trends in the business and tech marketplace that impact future vision and roadmap of the product portfolio; coaching PMs to build actionable backlogs of user stories for scrum teams; and helping to drive overall growth and effectiveness across the entire product’s scope; partnering effectively with other product and engineering leaders to manage internal platform services enabling data products across the organization.

Job Responsibilities:

Business Outcomes of Technology Platform

• Identify and ensure that quantitative business outcomes of our tech platform are achieved (e.g. OKRs for cost, quality, productivity, developer NPS, etc.)
• Evaluate and respond to top product optimization opportunities from users and internal customers
• Collaborate with UX, architecture and engineering leadership on future state
• Enforce product boundaries that align with product and tech strategy (avoiding scope creep)
• Collaborate with release management on affecting SDLC process improvements

Act as Voice of Customer to Help Prioritize Product Vision

• Communicate needs and opportunities for our internal tech services ; understand what is next and when to stay the course
• Evaluate and respond to top product optimization opportunities from internal users and developers
• Support resolution of product related escalations
• Provide partnership and leadership to internal product operations and developer communications that elevate internal change management and adoption

Product Roadmap Creation / Collaboration

• Define new products and services by outlining approach to achieve desired outcomes within the boundaries of products, organized into a multi-year road map.
• Leverage insights and feedback from both developers and internal tech end users to improve product decisions.
• Maintain consistent and cooperative relationships with key internal leaders, peer group, and third party vendors and other contributors to ensure effective communication, timely decision making and appropriate escalation paths.
• Make critical business decisions including build vs. buy
• Act as accountable party for long-term portfolio and product strategy

Team Leadership

• Meet scorecard goals by leading, inspiring, and developing a team of athenistas, modeling effective relationship building, ensuring high employee engagement, and managing staff career progression
• Lead strategy discussions with directs, help directs understand and own the overall strategic direction as well as executable plan to push out to broader teams
• Set and monitor annual performance goals & objectives, including responsibility for performance appraisals

Typical Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience is required in a software or computer technology field; engineering, computer science or information systems related fields strongly preferred
• Experience in SaaS technology leadership roles highly preferred ; especially in heterogeneous tech platforms and DevSecOps
• Demonstration of technical product leadership understanding - ability to gut check technical feasibility and timelines and remove technical development barriers with engineering and architecture
• Demonstrated business leadership of business case development, cost savings management, outcome measurement, and financial acumen.
• Understanding of SaaS (Software as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) product management best practices, including experience in agile development environments
• Experience leading teams and managing direct reports
• International Travel required, predicting 5-10%; time may vary and will include office site visits, vendor meetings, and conferences.