Senior Product Manager

The Senior Product Manager is accountable for the end-to-end management of software product strategy and evolution. This role is embedded in the delivery organization and is expected to create clarity, structure, and predictability by establishing a practical operating model across product discovery, delivery execution, and the go-to-market interface.

The Senior Product Manager partners closely with the Product Owner: the Product Manager owns product strategy and outcomes; the Product Owner owns backlog execution and sprint-level scope readiness.

1) Product strategy, vision & outcomes

- Own product vision, goals, and measurable outcomes for products, aligned with business strategy and delivery constraints.

- Translate business needs and user problems into an outcome-driven product strategy and roadmap.

- Define and maintain product-level success metrics and targets.

- Lead continuous discovery: customer/problem understanding, hypotheses, validation, and prioritization inputs.

- Make and document product trade-offs and decisions (value, cost of delay, risk, dependencies).

2) Governance & operating model

- Design and implement a lightweight operating model covering:

- demand intake and triage (customer requests, go-to-market asks, internal stakeholders, engineering/NFR needs)

- decision rights and escalation path (product decisions, scope decisions, release decisions)

- cadence and artifacts (roadmap review, portfolio/backlog review, release planning, decision log, risk log)

- Establish a clear working agreement between go-to-market and delivery:

- who can commit what, when

- how pre-sales promises translate into validated, prioritized product work

- how delivery constraints are communicated and enforced

- Define and socialize role boundaries (PM vs PO vs Engineering Manager vs Architect), ensuring the model is workable for a small team.

3) Portfolio & roadmap management

- Own the integrated roadmap across the products, including sequencing, dependency management, and capacity-aware planning.

- Ensure proper balancing between:

- customer value / feature work

- operational reliability

- technical debt and lifecycle work

- prototype discovery and pilot delivery

- Provide clear visibility on what is “Now / Next / Later” and why.

4) Backlog leadership & prioritization (PM + PO partnership)

- Own prioritization principles and final priority calls (PM), in partnership with the PO who operationalizes them into backlog readiness.

- Ensure non-functional requirements and technical debt are treated as first-class product work with explicit business rationale (risk reduction, compliance, stability, cost of delay, customer impact).

- Ensure a transparent and auditable prioritization mechanism (e.g., RICE/WSJF or a tailored approach) appropriate for the team.

5) Execution partnership with Engineering & Architecture (PM leadership, PO execution)

- Partner with the Engineering Manager and Architect to:

- align on release goals and constraints

- manage scope trade-offs and risks proactively

- ensure architecture decisions support product direction without over-engineering

- Ensure operational readiness for the live SaaS product:

- support model expectations, incident/bug triage process, SLAs/OLAs, release communication, lifecycle management

- Drive alignment on “definition of done” and acceptance criteria at the right level (PM validates outcomes; PO validates delivery acceptance).

6) Go-to-market and commercialization support (PM ownership; not a sales substitute)

- Collaborate with go-to-market on positioning, packaging, and pipeline alignment.

- Provide product expertise for proposals, RFI/RFP responses, demos, and stakeholder presentations when needed.

- Identify opportunities to enhance existing products or convert prototypes into commercially viable offerings.

- Build business cases and impact assessments for product investments (value, cost, risk, alternatives).

7) Compliance, risk, and external constraints (PM ownership with delivery partners)

- Monitor and translate legislative, regulatory, contractual, and shareholder requirements into product requirements and priorities.

- Ensure risk tracking and mitigation plans for security, data handling, platform lifecycle, and operational continuity.

Knowledge, skills and attributes

- Senior product management fundamentals: discovery, roadmap, prioritization, metrics, stakeholder management.

- Proven ability to establish governance/operating models in ambiguous environments and make them stick without bureaucracy.

- Strong commercial acumen: value framing, ROI thinking, pricing/packaging inputs, and portfolio investment decisions.

- Strong partnership approach with engineering: able to discuss architecture at a high level and negotiate pragmatic trade-offs.

- Excellent written and verbal communication; produces clear artifacts (product briefs, roadmap, decision logs, release comms).

- Outcome-driven and pragmatic; introduces “just enough” process to increase clarity and predictability.

Academic qualifications and certifications

- Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent experience) in Business, IT, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

- Beneficial (not mandatory): Agile/Scrum/SAFe, ITIL/ITSM, product management certifications.

Required experience

- Senior experience in Product Management (or equivalent product leadership roles) in a technology environment, ideally B2B.

- Track record managing an existing product in production (operational realities, customer expectations, technical debt, security/performance lifecycle).

- Demonstrated ability to work effectively with a separate Product Owner function and cross-functional delivery teams.

- Experience bringing structure to growing teams: decision rights, governance, prioritization, and stakeholder management.

- Experience guiding prototypes/pilots toward productization through validation, prioritization, and stakeholder alignment.

Nice-to-have

- SaaS lifecycle management experience (cloud, observability, incident management, release management).

- Data platform / dataspace / ecosystem product exposure.

- Strong Jira/Confluence literacy and ability to improve ways of working through tool discipline.

- Exposure to security/compliance practices (e.g., threat modeling, pen tests, risk acceptance).