Director, Product Management

at  Plotly

Plotly builds tools that help data scientists tell stories and generate data visualizations. Our tooling’s capabilities for generating useful and beautiful ways to look at data is key to our success. This will become increasingly important as we build new no-code products and as AI makes code generation easier and easier. Design will be a key differentiating factor for Plotly’s success.
The Director of Product Management is responsible for managing Product team and Design team members, leading feature design initiatives, and removing roadblocks. A successful candidate will require developing a deep understanding of the market, the customers, the competition, and the product.
The Director of Product Management plays a vital role in helping develop product strategy and roadmap, working with stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements, conducting market research, analyzing the competition, while still playing an active role in product management. They will develop requirements, designs and specifications and work closely with the engineering team to ensure that the product is built to specification and meets the customer’s needs. The Director of Product Management is responsible for mentoring a team of product managers and ensuring that the team’s output and artifacts are developed on time and to increasing quality standards. Reporting into the CEO, you will have a

JOB REQUIREMENTS:

• Experience: 7+ years of product management experience, with 3+ years in a leadership role, ideally within strong SaaS and enterprise software experience.
• Technical Expertise: Strong understanding of data science methodologies, machine learning, and data visualization tools. Familiarity with data platforms, APIs, and cloud-based environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) is a plus.
• Leadership Skills: Proven experience managing and mentoring high-performing product teams. Ability to inspire and guide product managers and cross-functional teams.
• Customer-Centric: Strong track record of building products that meet customer needs, with a deep understanding of user-centered design and UX best practices.
• Analytical Skills: Ability to analyze complex data, market conditions, and product performance metrics to make informed decisions and adjust product strategy as needed.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field. MBA or advanced degree in a technical field is a plus.

DEPARTMENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES (75%):

• Work in a cross-functional and collaborative role spanning product, design, development, documentation, marketing, sales, and support as well as our business partners.
• Coordinate and collaborate across Plotly Leadership, and across other teams to help drive buy-in and agreement on the vision and the product suite.
• Lead customer preview programs and engage in frequent conversations with customers to understand their needs, listen to their feedback, and determine the usability of the product which will influence the product roadmap and feature design.
• Own the end-to-end feature lifecycle from customer scenarios, product requirements, priorities, customer reviews, all the way to product/feature evangelism.
• Leverage data to help find the best solution to our complex problems.
• Assist in the design and development of the 2-6 month roadmap.
• Effectively manage the Product team to meet organizational goals (including,planning, hiring, onboarding, career development, compensation, and continuous feedback)
• Actively ensure the team’s knowledge sharing and capture using Confluence, or other appropriate tools.
• Establish team structures and processes that scale.

PRODUCT MANAGER RESPONSIBILITIES (25%):

• Customer interviews - understand customers and prospective customers needs and their use cases.
• Write product pitches that capture requirements, rationale for product choices, alternatives considered, and why the proposed design was chosen. Ensure that the pitch describes an implementable design.
• Commercialization - partner closely with marketing and other functions to successfully bring a product to market.
• Be familiar with and use the suite of Plotly products..