Principal Product Manager job description

Product management — Principal Product Manager
Sets product strategy and practice across the organisation.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Discovery
- Problem Discovery and Framing — You can set how discovery is done across a portfolio of products, and step in when a team is stuck on a framing that is the actual blocker to progress.
- Applying User-Centred Insights — You can advocate for research across every user group a product touches, and help other teams choose the right method for the insight they need.
- Opportunity Sizing — You can set the sizing method a portfolio uses to compare investments, and correct a sizing model that has been quietly gamed.
- Competitor and Market Analysis — You can read a crowded or shifting market and say where the product should sit in it, including which segments to leave alone. You are trusted to tell leadership that the feared competitor is not the real threat.
- Customer and Sales Feedback Loops — You can run the feedback loop for your product: you decide what gets captured, go back to the people who reported it, and use the themes in roadmap arguments. You notice when loud sales requests do not match usage data.

Strategy & Roadmap
- Product Strategy and Vision — You can set product strategy at the organisation level, and decide when the organisation's own broader strategy needs to change.
- Product Roadmap Prioritisation — You can set the prioritisation approach a whole portfolio uses, and override it in the specific cases where the approach does not fit.
- Product Life Cycle Management — You can steer a product through an awkward transition, including retiring one that customers still pay for, with a migration path they accept. You set the evidence that says a product has moved phase.
- Business Case and ROI Justification — You can make the case for an investment whose return is uncertain or slow to arrive, and set out what would prove it wrong. You survive finance pulling the model apart because the assumptions are all on the page.

Product Delivery
- Specification and Acceptance Criteria Writing — You can set the specification standard your team writes to, and rescue a spec that shipped the wrong thing because it was unclear.
- Agile and Lean Delivery Practices — You can coach several teams in Agile and Lean practice, and tailor the approach as each team context changes.
- Backlog Refinement and Sprint Facilitation — You can keep a backlog healthy when several teams and dependencies feed it, and keep planning useful when priorities move mid-quarter. You are the one who notices that a well-groomed backlog is aimed at the wrong outcome.
- Release and Launch Management — You can run a launch with many moving parts, such as pricing changes, data migration or partners, and keep every group working to one plan. You decide what ships behind a flag and what gets announced.
- Technical Feasibility Collaboration — You can work through feasibility on ambiguous, high-risk work and reshape the product idea until it fits what can actually be built. You take on technical debt deliberately, with the repayment agreed rather than implied.
- Design Collaboration and UX Feedback — You can hold the product line on a hard trade-off between what users want and what the business can carry, and keep design trusting the process. You are who designers come to when the user need and the goal pull apart.

Analytics & Growth
- Product Analytics and Metrics Definition — You can decide what a whole portfolio measures itself by, and change that framework when it no longer reflects the strategy.
- Experiment Design and Interpretation — You can decide when experimentation is the wrong tool for a decision, and set experimentation policy across a portfolio.
- Growth and Retention Metrics — You can work out why growth or retention is stalling across a whole funnel and get the fix prioritised against feature work. You choose the metric a team is measured on knowing exactly how it could be gamed.

Leadership & GTM
- Pricing and Packaging Input — You can lead a repackaging or pricing change across a product line, coordinating with sales, finance and legal on the transition.
- Go-to-Market Coordination — You can set the go-to-market standard a portfolio follows, and decide which launches warrant full coordination versus a lighter process.
- Cross-Functional Stakeholder Alignment — You can set how stakeholder relationships are managed across a portfolio, and step in on the relationships nobody else can repair.
- Executive and Board Communication — You can shape what leadership believes about the product portfolio over months, not just inside one meeting. Executives ask for your read before they set direction rather than after.
- Product Team Leadership and Coaching — You can set how product managers are hired, levelled and developed across the organisation. You grow leaders who go on to run teams of their own.
- Cross-Team Portfolio Management — You can decide how investment is split across the portfolio and reshape team boundaries when the strategy changes. You move people away from work you sponsored yourself when the portfolio needs them elsewhere.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run the organisation's largest and most contested programmes, and the planning practices you introduce get adopted by teams you do not lead.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast at the scale of quarters and headcount, and the estimation practice you set is what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders route ownerless problems to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tooling and habits that make the careful path the easy one.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole class of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create measurably improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can dismantle the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Technical Writing — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you authored are still in use long after you moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most consequential relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong practitioners.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) (required from Product Manager)
- Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I) (required from Product Manager)
- Pragmatic Certified Product Manager (required from Senior Product Manager)