Director of Product Management

Deque Systems, Inc. is a web accessibility software and services company focused on achieving digital equality. The Director of Product Management will set product strategy and vision, prioritize roadmaps, lead continuous discovery, and align product delivery with customer needs and company strategy. The role also leads and mentors product managers, coordinates cross-functional collaboration, and drives product management practices across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Own product strategy and vision, ensuring it aligns with company strategy and the competitive landscape
• Continuously engage with customers, users, Sales, Support, and Customer Success to be the embodiment of the product's target market for the rest of the development team
• Own and prioritize the product roadmap, ensuring teams focus on the highest-impact work aligned with the product vision and company strategy
• Define and communicate product requirements, priorities, business outcomes, and release objectives
• Act as the voice of the customer and target market for Product Development and cross-functional teams
• Work closely with Engineering Managers to ensure teams iterate quickly to make the product more competitive and valuable
• Partner closely with Product Development throughout discovery, validation, delivery, and iteration cycles
• Coach and mentor other Product Managers, sharing frameworks and best practices that raise the bar across the product team
• Collaborate with Product Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to support positioning, enablement, launches, and strategic customer engagements
• Monitor customer feedback, market trends, competitive positioning, and product performance to inform prioritization and strategy
• Communicate product strategy, roadmap updates, and priorities effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences, including company leadership
• Help to set product management practices, standards, and processes at Deque, and define the process for effective coordination and execution across teams and departments. Help to define the overall product strategy and ensure alignment across the full product portfolio, not only the assigned area
• Evaluate and prioritize proposed features and products using a robust framework spanning customer needs, strategic impact, sales needs, market alternatives, and impact on the platform; assist more junior product managers with their roadmaps
• Build organizational product competence: map, unify, and standardize product processes across products so that all product content is current at each release and Sales and Solutions Engineers are fluent in the product, its value proposition, and how to demo and present it
• Help to create and maintain the competitive radar-scope for the Deque product suite, and propose, implement, and maintain market-traction metrics for the suite
• Form relationships with strategically important industry analysts and look for opportunities to co-present with them to deepen those relationships and achieve marketing objectives
• Work with product marketing, to implement the organization's enablement of the product: training for Sales and Solutions Engineers, Product Success (Technical Solutions Architects and Implementation Engineers), and Help Desk Engineers
• Create and maintain product Intranet content and sales collateral; run product forums for the products in scope
• Drive marketing and sales proactively to address market and sales opportunities for products in scope
• Help present to customers about upcoming releases and the product roadmap, and form direct relationships with users at lead customers
• Ensure team efficiency is understood relative to industry and company benchmarks; work with Engineering Managers and Product Owners to measure and improve team effectiveness, and foster a culture of team output over individual output
• Regularly run some department and cross-company meetings, and form strong relationships with peers across the organization and with senior executives

Requirements:

• 7+ years of product management experience with demonstrated leadership experience and strategic business impact, including experience working for a B2B software company with ~$50mm in revenue
• Demonstrated ownership of product strategy and roadmap prioritization across multiple quarterly planning cycles
• Experience mentoring, coaching, or informally guiding other Product Managers (formal people management not required)
• Experience working for an early-stage B2B software tech startup and at a fully remote company
• Experience partnering with direct sales organizations, including Account Executives and Solutions Engineers
• Experience working for a company with multiple products as part of an integrated platform
• Experience supporting Fortune 500 and mid-market companies
• Worked closely with Product Development team members as primary users/stakeholders
• Experience balancing customer demands, competitive pressures, and the need to progress toward product vision
• Experience articulating the value proposition and ROI of the product to both internal and external audiences
• Experience identifying, analyzing, and tracking main competitive products and market positioning
• Strong history of direct customer engagement, including discovery conversations, product feedback sessions, and strategic account interactions
• Continuous discovery
• Customer empathy and advocacy
• Engaging users, customers, and non-customers in early-stage product development
• Setting and communicating product strategy
• Coaching and developing PM talent
• Using AI tools for Product Management work
• Using AI coding tools to create working prototypes
• Articulate speaker (impromptu and prepared), persuasive writer, and motivating presenter