Director, Product Management

Illumia provides integrated technology solutions for education, healthcare, and business campuses. The Director of Product Management owns outcomes for a defined portion of the Higher Education portfolio, leading product teams, developing Product Managers, establishing discovery and prioritization practices, and representing the portfolio in executive planning.

Responsibilities:

• Owns outcomes for a defined portion of Illumia's Higher Education portfolio, working through Product Managers rather than directing delivery personally
• Hires, coaches, and develops a team of Product Managers, including performance management, pay reviews, and growth planning
• Establishes and protects continuous discovery practices across their teams: customer interviews, workflow observation, prototyping, and usability testing
• Ensures every team evaluates opportunities against the four product risks—value, usability, feasibility, and viability—before committing engineering capacity
• Holds teams accountable for outcome-based roadmaps built around objectives and key results, rather than fixed feature lists and dates
• Coaches Product Managers on opportunity framing, stakeholder communication, and defending prioritization calls with evidence
• Partners with Product Design and Engineering leadership to keep trios genuinely empowered, with design and engineering involved from the start of discovery, not after requirements are set
• Builds the business case and narrative for major investments within their product area, in partnership with the CPO and other product leaders
• Reports on portfolio health, discovery coverage, and progress against objectives to executive leadership. Uses telemetry and usage data, not delivery milestones alone, to judge whether outcomes are actually being achieved

Requirements:

• 12+ years of Product Management experience in B2B SaaS or enterprise software, including 5+ years of formal & direct people management experience
• Demonstrated experience running and coaching continuous discovery: customer interviews, prototyping, and usability testing
• Experience operating in, or building, an empowered product team model, where Product, Design, and Engineering share accountability for outcomes
• Ability to make and defend prioritization decisions using evidence, under incomplete information and competing stakeholder demands
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting to and influencing executive level stakeholders
• Demonstrated ability to build and lead a team, setting clear expectations and creating growth paths for Product Managers
• Travel up to 15%
• familiarity with SVPG or Cagan-style continuous discovery practices, including the Opportunity Solution Tree technique
• experience building products for colleges or universities or in another campus-based or trust- and compliance-intensive environment
• familiarity with the workflows and constraints of registrars, bursars, campus IT, housing, dining, or student life offices
• experience managing a portfolio of product areas or leading managers of Product Managers