Lead Product Manager

At Appian, we're not only about building awesome software, but also about growing our culture of passion, energy, and innovation; great people, great software! As a Lead Product Manager you will be a strategic leader on the product management team, overseeing the vision and product portfolio backlog. This role combines experienced product management leadership with the pivotal responsibilities of a Group Product Lead, offering an opportunity to shape the product strategy and the missions of several teams. You will oversee the product management execution working closely with the product managers for several cross-functional software engineering teams. This position reports to the Head of Product for the Platform Engineering Strategic Business Unit, which is responsible for Appian Cloud offering.

This position will be specifically focused on the foundational infrastructure of Appian Cloud. You will provide product management leadership for initiatives that deliver a highly available, resilient, scalable, and efficient platform on which all Appian Cloud services operate. Your portfolio will include the AWS account and VPC topology, Kubernetes clusters, network mesh, and edge web layer that is fundamental to Appian Cloud, as well as the governance, tooling, and observability stack that allows our teams to deploy, operate, and monitor secure cloud native services and resources. The product portfolio for this position also includes the connectivity capabilities to securely and reliably connect Appian Cloud to customer-managed resources in their data center or cloud environments, including a new zero-trust connector.  

You'll form strong relationships with counterparts within the Engineering department as well as stakeholders in other departments. You will oversee the creation of an impactful vision and ensure alignment between the product managers in your group and the roadmaps of the feature teams that rely on the services and frameworks provided by your organization. You will be accountable for the business impact of the features your group delivers. This includes owning the product strategy and feature backlog and ensuring effectiveness and adherence to standard product management processes.

This role is based at our HQ in McLean, VA. Appian was built on a culture of in-person collaboration, which we believe is a key driver of our mission to be the best. Employees hired for this position are expected to be in the office 5 days a week to foster that culture and ensure we continue to thrive through shared ideas and teamwork. We believe being in the office provides more opportunities to come together and celebrate working with the exceptional people across Appian.

What you'll do

• Oversee the initiation, planning, execution, and rollout for strategic initiatives.
• Lead the creation and ongoing maintenance of a multi-team, short-term and long-term feature backlogs strongly aligned to product and corporate vision.
• Initiate and facilitate conversations across business units and departments to reach alignment on strategy, roadmap, key investments and messaging. 
• Build relationships with key business stakeholders, keeping them apprised of important features, critical scope changes, planned investments.
• Help identify and cultivate the next generation of product management leaders.
• Provide constructive feedback on feature specifications to ensure new feature delivery provides optimal impact.
• Coach product managers on balancing functional and non-functional enhancements and system improvements.
• Continuously enhance and improve the product management processes and techniques at Appian.

About you

• Strong technical background, likely as a former software architect or infrastructure engineer who later became a product manager.
• Passion for the backend and infrastructure technologies that power cloud-based enterprise software systems, including proprietary, open-source, and industry-standard components, especially those in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape.
• Experience with cloud native technologies and Kubernetes. An especially strong candidate will have previous exposure to the infrastructure behind Software-as-a-Service cloud product offerings.
• Deep understanding of networking and cross-VPC connectivity and the security and compliance requirements that apply to such systems with respect to enterprise customers. Previous experience with zero trust connectivity implementations would be a strong asset.
• Experience delivering cloud infrastructure features built using AWS services such as EKS, ECR, transit gateways, WAFs, and Global Accelerator (or similar offering from other cloud providers).
• Familiarity with the following technologies: Karpenter, Cilium, KNative, Keda, Crossplane, ArgoCD, Prometheus.
• Strong interest in the scalability, performance, security, observability, and reliability of distributed systems.
• Excellent communication skills, comfortable talking high-level strategy with CxOs in the morning and feature details with developers in the afternoon.
• Consistent track record of overseeing the successful delivery of multiple features across several teams.
• Proficient in conducting impact mapping activities and measuring success criteria.
• Experience leading the product management processes at a software product company.
• Experience working with multiple product managers at various stages in their careers.

Preferred Experience Level: 9+ years of product management experience

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