Product Line Manager

Ciena is a global leader in high-speed connectivity committed to a people-first approach. The role of Product Line Manager involves working closely with cross-functional teams to manage the lifecycle of Ciena’s Interconnects portfolio, focusing on high-speed interconnect technologies and ensuring alignment with customer needs and market trends.

Responsibilities:

• Work in a cross-functional manner across Ciena’s modem and component teams and help define industry best practice of selling modem components as products to customers
• Develop commercialization requirements such as SDK, documentation content, and sales support framework
• Define product strategy and multiyear roadmap for technologies such as CPO, NPO, Advanced optical packaging and Electrical interconnects
• Define commercial offer and pricing structure that is in line with industry norm
• Develop business cases and get approval for new features or initiatives
• Continuously assess customer needs, technology trends, regulatory environment, and major competitors
• Gather feature requirements from key customers (end customers, product marketing, and sales organization)
• Develop and maintain strategic product roadmap, priorities, and gap analysis
• Partner with marketing teams to develop product positioning and marketing collaterals (e.g., external presentations, data sheets, value propositions, competitive analyses, etc.)
• Work with product line managers and R&D architects in prioritizing features and defining roadmaps
• Assist sales with coherent modem/components roadmap presentations, collecting customer requirements, assessing modem/components fit to customer needs and preparing product specifications and proposals including responding to customer RFI/RFP for all coherent modem/components related requirements
• Serve as a key interface between engineering and sales/customers
• Function as a focal point to align design, product line managers, supporting groups, and product marketing towards a common goal
• This critical, high visibility role blends coherent domain technical expertise, an eye for business, and people influencing soft skills
• ~20% travel required including international (e.g. customer visits, trade shows, cross-functional meetings, etc.)

Requirements:

• Familiarity with the major players in the optical and electrical interconnect market, their products, positioning, and strategies
• Solid knowledge of high speed interconnect technologies (such as Co-Packaged Optics (CPO), Near Packaged Optics (NPO), Active Electrical cable (AEC), active copper cable (ACC), coherent, direct detect, Serdes, PHYs, electro-optics) and consumption models (modules, bare dies, chiplets)
• Technical background and understanding of a wide variety of interconnect technologies, emerging component options and standards
• Solid understanding of how to commercialize interconnect optics and sub-components – expert in understanding of component product sales approach and competitive landscape
• Superb communication, presentation, customer interaction and interpersonal skills. Ability to communicate highly technical matters to non-technical individuals
• Flexible, able to balance multiple tasks with minimal direction
• Self-motivated. Need to work well with a virtual team or individually as necessary
• Education: Technical degree (BSEE minimum) and 10+ years technical experience in telecommunications or component industry
• Experience: Successful 3+ years of Product Management experience in telecom systems or components; or 8-10+ years of demonstrated experience in relevant areas including FAE and Sales Engineering. Prior Product Management, Solutions Architect, or Technical Marketing experience is highly desired