Sr. Director, Product Operations

Job Summary

Provides guidance to assigned product leaders and their direct reports, and ensures work is distributed across the team in a manner that optimizes throughput and builds skills and capabilities. Monitors evolution in the industry, innovation in parallel industries, competitor products, market, and consumer trends, to drive product portfolio decisions. Establishes, directs, and maintains the overall policies and strategies for product operations.

Key Responsibilities

Leads, guides, evaluates and monitors deliverables of assigned product team(s). Ensures clarity around priorities and provides performance feedback and coaching. Motivates and empowers department leaders to manage day-to-day execution of team operations and removes obstacles to improve team productivity & effectiveness. Encourages leadership development and growth and implements professional development plans for high-potential employees. Ensures performance issues are addressed timely and appropriately.

Works in collaboration with senior leadership to identify and execute engagement, recognition, promotion, and retention strategies, focused on making sure the organization has the right talent to drive product strategy and initiatives forward.

Guides and assists the creation of the product roadmap, success criteria, and product launch plans to drive clear prioritization, organizational alignment, customer satisfaction, and sales.

Partners regularly with senior management and leadership teams to develop OEC and product line strategies and delivers on team and OEC’s goals.

Models adaptability by encouraging continuous evolution to product portfolio considering industry trends, emerging solutions, new insights, and changing customer and business needs.

Develops and builds business cases reflecting all necessary commercial and technical considerations required to secure product development funding. Ensures teams are creating detailed plans and executing them to meet financial commitments of projects.

Partners with Technology leaders to refine and deploy effective collaboration techniques between product and engineering.

Owns organizational approach to product lifecycle management, including clear and consistent frameworks for how investment decisions are made across the portfolio.

Designs product packaging, pricing, and name to distinguish product line(s) from other OEC and competitive products in line with the product’s value proposition and refines the approach to voice of customer (VoC) and market research so that customer and market insight consistently informs product decisions.

Defines core services across the portfolio that are customer-focused, revenue-generating, strategically sound, and operationally central.

Recruits, hires and onboards new product leaders and staff. Ensures newly hired employees have the tools, resources, and knowledge needed to be successful at OEC.

Supports the legal team and subsequent agreement needs, business development strategy, and related work.

Assists in developing annual department budget(s). Identifies, manages, and allocates company resources (budget and staffing) to ensure business goals can be accomplished, while ensuring fiscal responsibility.

Continuously innovates on best practices for how AI is leveraged, both internally and within the products themselves.

Education

A bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university is required, with a focus in Business, Marketing, or related discipline. In the absence of a degree, equivalent work experience directly related to the key responsibilities of the role will be considered as a substitute for the degree.

Experience, Skills and Key Competencies

At least 14 years of progressively responsible experience in a product development environment managing large scale projects and implementations, plus at least 10 years of people management experience with responsibility for leading a team of direct reports.

Must also be able to demonstrate the following skills and abilities:

Ability to lead diverse teams and create an engaging and positive culture that motivates and empowers others to do their best work; can unlock the full potential of product teams.

Background as both a hands-on product manager and a senior people leader with a genuine passion for product operations.

Applied AI experience, ideally including designing and building AI agents.

Experience in a private equity-backed business, with software as a service (SaaS) background.

Experience with Profit & Loss (P&L) management and department budgeting.

Excellent at coaching and developing people, building strong leaders and a deep bench of talent.

Able to lead without authority, influencing and aligning stakeholders across product, engineering, and the broader business.

A proven change agent who drives adoption of new processes, tools, and ways of working.

Monetization and pricing experience, including pricing strategy.

Strong interpersonal skills with executive presence, and able to collaborate across all levels of the organization.

Flexible and adaptable approach to work and can effectively support product leaders and their staff through change management and with adjusting to shifts in priorities as the needs of the business change.

Travel

Travel for this position is required and anticipated to be approximately 10-20% of the time.