Technical Product Manager - AI, Project/Product/Program Management
No salary listed
Mid, Senior
Bachelor's
Nashville, TN, USA
HybridFour days on-site per week required.
ProductTechnical Product Management
About the job
Requirements
- Proven ability to write clear product requirements, functional design documents, and user stories with clear acceptance criteria that engineers can build directly from.
- Experience running agile ceremonies, including sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives, and stakeholder demos.
- Ability to prioritize under ambiguity, explain trade-offs, and move the team forward.
- Ability to decompose complex workflows into phased delivery plans; familiarity with minimum viable product scoping and iterative rollout.
- Ability to facilitate reviews with senior sponsors and individual contributors.
- Ability to read and reason about API contracts, data schemas, and system diagrams; production coding is not required, but conceptual code review is expected.
- Working knowledge of AI and machine learning product capabilities and limitations, including retrieval-augmented generation, large language model-based classification, and agentic workflows.
- Comfort working in Jira, Linear, or equivalent backlog-management tools; familiarity with Git-based documentation workflows, Markdown, and pull-request-based review.
- Ability to interpret dashboards and basic data queries to investigate product questions.
- Excellent written communication for product requirements documents, status updates, and decision logs.
- Experience partnering with data, finance, and legal teams as internal customers or reviewers.
- Ability to present to technical teams and non-technical business stakeholders, adjusting the level of detail accordingly.
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Supply Chain, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- Three to six years of product management or product analyst experience, including at least one to two years in a technically complex or AI-adjacent product environment.
Responsibilities
- Own functional design specifications and the product backlog across the AI-enabled sourcing platform, and serve as the accountable author of specifications used directly by engineering.
- Translate sourcing and procurement workflows, including calendaring, market intelligence, contract management, and commodity analysis, into clear product requirements for engineers.
- Define and prioritize AI-enabled platform features, balancing business value, data readiness, and technical feasibility.
- Coordinate with business stakeholders to resolve data, integration, and policy questions that could block engineering.
- Drive each module's functional specification from draft through stakeholder sign-off.
- Write user stories and acceptance criteria across modules and keep the sprint backlog current and prioritized.
- Facilitate sign-off gates as modules progress through product requirements, functional design, technical design, quality assurance, and release, ensuring the required approver is recorded before each phase advances.
- Drive AI governance checkpoints with Security, Architecture, and Legal, covering AI ethics, data privacy, model validation, and production readiness.
- Partner with procurement, supply chain, finance, and legal stakeholders to gather requirements, resolve questions, and obtain decisions so engineering is not blocked.
- Represent the team in leadership demonstrations and status reviews, translating engineering delivery progress into a business-level narrative.
- Own the phased delivery plan across releases, tracking current minimum viable product features, deferred features, and work requiring AI enablers.
- Coordinate data readiness with business partners, including sample data, field mappings, and system-of-record decisions, to address enterprise-system integration blockers.
- Run agile ceremonies, including sprint planning, backlog grooming, demonstrations, and retrospectives, and manage the cross-module sprint backlog alongside the Principal Engineer.
- Participate in user acceptance testing and AI output reviews, and determine whether releases are ready for stakeholders.
Desired Qualifications
- Hands-on experience in or building products for Source-to-Contract or Procure-to-Pay workflows, such as RFx, supplier evaluation, contract lifecycle, commodity management, or spend analytics.
- Familiarity with enterprise procurement platforms such as Coupa, SAP Ariba, Oracle, or Jaggaer.
- Understanding of sourcing calendars, commodity price benchmarking, supplier performance management, or contract analytics.
- Knowledge of compliance and auditability requirements common in enterprise procurement.
- Experience as a product manager or analyst at a consumer packaged goods, retail, foodservice, or global supply chain organization.
- Prior work on AI-enabled enterprise products rather than only traditional software-as-a-service products.
- Familiarity with engineering delivery metrics, such as deployment frequency, lead time, and incident rate, and how they inform product and roadmap decisions.
About the company
Starbucks runs coffeehouses around the world that serve espresso drinks, brewed coffee, tea, and food, and it roasts the arabica coffee its stores sell. It grew from a single Seattle shop selling beans into the world's largest coffeehouse chain, and it helped make Italian-style espresso drinks such as lattes an everyday habit in the United States. Customers order at the counter, at drive-throughs, or ahead through the Starbucks app, whose rewards program trades points for free drinks and food. The company earns money from cafés it operates itself and from fees paid by licensed stores in places such as airports and grocery stores. Starbucks was founded in 1971 and is based in Seattle.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Seattle, Washington
Founded
1971
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Customers are coming back: North American store transactions rose 4.5% in the quarter ended June 2026.
- Baristas get more help: the Green Apron service model added over $500 million in extra store staffing hours.
- Momentum lifted the outlook: in July 2026, Starbucks raised its yearly comparable sales growth forecast to slightly above 6%.
What critics are saying
- Corporate jobs keep shrinking: Starbucks cut 300 U.S. support roles and closed Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas offices in May 2026.
- Union talks drag on: about 600 unionized cafés still lacked a first contract as of March 2026.
- Extra staffing squeezes profit: operating margins fell nearly by half after the turnaround began in late 2024.
What makes Starbucks unique
- Starbucks breeds its own coffee trees: its Costa Rica research farm developed rust-resistant varieties it gives farmers free.
- Grocery sales are prepaid: Nestlé paid Starbucks about $7 billion upfront for rights to sell its packaged coffee worldwide.
- Starbucks licenses rather than runs China: Boyu Capital's joint venture operates its 7,991 Chinese cafés under Starbucks' brand.
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Benefits
- Health Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance
- Paid Vacation
- Paid Sick Leave
- Paid Holidays
- Parental Leave
- 401(k) Retirement Plan
- 401(k) Company Match
- Stock Options