Job Description
Job Mission:
Own and deliver on a product area while building the product management team’s capabilities, processes, and culture. Accountable for both product outcomes and the growth of PMs on the team.
Key responsibilities:
- Partner with the CEO & executive team to set product strategy and prioritize development objectives across all product areas
- Interface with clients to uncover market problems, test divergent ideas and converge on the best solution that is valuable, usable and feasible
- Drive outcomes by setting the strategic direction (roadmap) and managing the tactical implementation (backlog) for owned product area while ensuring consistent practice across the PM team
- Support launching products in the market, including sales readiness, go-to-market activities and ongoing post-launch efforts
- Build and develop the PM team — hire, coach, and establish the methodologies, rituals, and quality bar for product management
- Represent the product function in executive and cross-functional leadership forums
Product Discovery & Opportunity Assessment
- Runs a continuous-discovery loop (weekly customer touchpoints, rapid experiments, opportunity-solution tree kept current).
- Frames market problems with clear learning objectives, risks & assumptions before delivery.
- Leads the Triad (PM + UX + Lead Engineer) to test value, usability & feasibility early; encourages intelligent risk-taking.
- Combines qualitative insight (interviews, jobs-to-be-done) with quantitative signal (usage, funnel, NPS) to size opportunities.
- Challenges assumptions openly—asks crisp, “what would have to be true?” questions.
- Leverages Generative AI capabilities as a product lever and can identity where AI adds genuine user value vs. where it’s cosmetic, and partners with engineering to evaluate feasibility.
- Owns an outcome-based roadmap that ties directly to company OKRs and 4-lens test (Strategy, Vision, Customer, Business).
- Gains executive & cross-functional alignment through storytelling and visuals; roadmaps are adaptable (reviewed at least quarterly).
- Converts high-level outcomes to measurable Key Results and maintains a visible trace from initiative → metric.
Product Ownership & Agile Delivery
- Serves as Product Owner for an agile process; backlog always reflects priority + class-of-service.
- Sets High-Integrity Commitments (fixed-date work) only when risk-adjusted forecasts support them; meets ≥ 90 % of those dates.
- Collaborates daily with engineering to slice value thinly, ensure definition-of-ready/done, and unblock swiftly.
- Leverage LLMs (Claude Code / Cowork) for user research synthesis, rapid prototyping, and backlog analysis and reporting.
Collaboration, Evangelism & Leadership
- Cultivates trust-first relationships; practices pre-wiring / shuttle diplomacy to avoid surprises.
- Evangelizes the product vision internally & externally; can demo, train, and support customers end-to-end.
- Models servant-leadership: creates psychological safety, celebrates experiments (even failed ones) and elevates team expertise.
- Proactively translates company strategy into product narratives that resonate with every function (sales, CX, marketing, finance).
- Represents the product function in executive and cross-functional leadership forums; owns the product narrative at the company level.
PM Team Leadership & Capability Building
- Establishes and coaches a consistent discovery and delivery methodology across PMs.
- Runs regular product reviews that elevate team thinking (not just status updates); sets the quality bar for specs, roadmaps, and stakeholder communication by example.
- Makes hiring decisions and builds a pipeline of PM talent; creates career development frameworks and gives direct, actionable feedback.
- Ensures consistent backlog health and delivery practices across all PM-owned products, not just their own.
- Creates psychological safety for the PM team; celebrates experiments (even failed ones) and elevates individual expertise.
Required Experience & Skills
- 7–10 years of software product management experience, including ownership of a product roadmap and backlog
- Demonstrated experience running continuous product discovery (customer interviews, experiments, opportunity sizing)
- Track record of shipping software products through a full lifecycle — from discovery through launch and iteration
- Experience working within Agile/Lean/Kanban delivery teams as a Product Owner or equivalent
- Strong data literacy — comfortable using analytics, funnel metrics, and usage data to inform decisions
- Technical fluency — able to collaborate deeply with engineering on feasibility, trade-offs, and system design (not expected to write code)
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; ability to lead meetings, present to executives, and facilitate cross-functional alignment
- Go-to-market experience — has partnered with sales, marketing, and CX on launches and enablement
- 2–3+ years of formal or informal leadership of other PMs, including mentoring and developing PM talent
- Comfort operating at both strategic and tactical altitude — can present a quarterly roadmap narrative to the board and write acceptance criteria in the same week
- BA/BS degree required
Preferred
- Experience with data integration, interoperability, or iPaaS/middleware products
- MBA or equivalent graduate degree
- Experience with outcome-based roadmapping and OKR frameworks
- Familiarity with LLM capabilities, prompt engineering, and the practical constraints of AI systems
- Experience scaling a PM team from 1–2 to 4–6 PMs, including establishing PM practices, rituals, and tooling
Nice-to-Have
- Prior experience working within Salesforce or Blackbaud ecosystems
- Prior experience working in the nonprofit sector (either at a nonprofit or at a nonprofit software/service provider)
