Lead Product Manager, Platform Engineering

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 scalable, enterprise-grade managed services that power the backend data persistence and event streams for customer sites in Appian Cloud. You will provide product management leadership for initiatives that deliver efficient and scalable core compute and managed data planes as multi-tenant services to accelerate the innovations of Engineering teams throughout the department. Your portfolio will also include efforts to transform existing systems and software components into cloud-native, Kubernetes-based services while achieving incremental value for our customers from intermediate milestones. This position also includes oversight of a multi-departmental campaign to transition our self-managed customers to Appian Cloud or the latest version of our self-managed offering which requires Kubernetes.

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.

What you'll do:

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  Oversee the initiation, planning, execution, and rollout for strategic initiatives.

  
  
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  Lead the creation and ongoing maintenance of a multi-team, short-term and long-term feature backlogs strongly aligned to product and corporate vision.

  
  
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  Initiate and facilitate conversations across business units and departments to reach alignment on strategy, roadmap, key investments and messaging.

  
  
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  Build relationships with key business stakeholders, keeping them apprised of important features, critical scope changes, planned investments.

  
  
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  Help identify and cultivate the next generation of product management leaders.

  
  
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  Provide constructive feedback on feature specifications to ensure new feature delivery provides optimal impact.

  
  
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  Coach product managers on balancing functional and non-functional enhancements and system improvements.

  
  
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  Continuously enhance and improve the product management processes and techniques at Appian.

  
  

About you:

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  Strong technical background, likely as a former software architect or developer who later became a product manager.

  
  
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  Passion for the backend and infrastructure technologies that power cloud-based enterprise software systems, including proprietary, open-source, and industry-standard components.

  
  
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  Experience with cloud native technologies and Kubernetes. An especially strong candidate will have previous exposure to delivering enterprise software to customers that run and manage their own Kubernetes clusters in addition to experience with these technologies as deployed in support of Software-as-a-Service offerings for enterprise customers.

  
  
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  Deep understanding of data persistence, object storage services, event streaming platforms, multi-tenant shared services, and the security and compliance requirements that apply to such systems with respect to enterprise customers.

  
  
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  Experience delivering features built on stateful services such as Redis, Kafka, DynamoDB, and S3.

  
  
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  Strong interest in the scalability, performance, security, observability, and reliability of distributed systems.

  
  
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  Excellent communication skills, comfortable talking high-level strategy with CxOs in the morning and feature details with developers in the afternoon.

  
  
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  Consistent track record of overseeing the successful delivery of multiple features across several teams.

  
  
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  Proficient in conducting impact mapping activities and measuring success criteria.

  
  
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  Experience leading the product management processes at a software product company.

  
  
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  Experience working with multiple product managers at various stages in their careers.

  
  

Preferred Experience Level:

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  Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field

  
  
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  9+ years of product management experience