Product Owner Manager

Gravity IT Resources is seeking a hands-on Product Manager to help lead a growing Shipboard Products organization for a global travel and hospitality client. This is a high-visibility leadership role spanning a new enterprise workforce-management platform and established hotel-side operational applications. Reporting to the Senior Manager of Shipboard Products, this person is expected to lead a team of approximately six. The ideal candidate grew from hands-on Product Ownership into people leadership and can balance product execution, coaching, budgets, resources, and complex stakeholder needs.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach, and develop approximately six product team members; set expectations, guide priorities, and support team growth and hiring.
• Own product direction and delivery oversight across Sea Time and Smart Services, balancing timelines, roadmap priorities, operational needs, and business outcomes.
• Stay close to execution: guide Product Owners on requirements, Jira backlogs, user stories, acceptance criteria, refinement, and engineering dependencies.
• Partner with engineering, QA, and technical teams to move products through build, validation, implementation, rollout, and stabilization.
• Manage staffing, team capacity, hours, budgets, resource allocation, delivery risks, and priorities across the product portfolios.
• Work with HR, Finance, Payroll, Hotel Operations, shipboard teams, and international business stakeholders to align requirements and decisions.
• Lead through ambiguity and regional complexity, including differing labor rules, currencies, scheduling practices, and operational workflows.
• Communicate status, tradeoffs, milestones, and risks to senior leadership while bringing structure and momentum to a growing organization.

Requirements:

Required

• Strong hands-on Product Owner / Product Management background delivering software or application products through requirements, engineering, testing, and launch; not strategy-only.
• Demonstrated people-leadership experience, ideally with at least 2–3 direct reports or equivalent responsibility, and the ability to lead a team of approximately six.
• Practical Agile / Jira knowledge, including backlog ownership, user stories, acceptance criteria, prioritization, and partnership with engineering teams.
• Experience overseeing product-team resources, staffing, budgets, capacity, team hours, and competing delivery priorities.
• Strong cross-functional stakeholder presence, with the ability to influence HR, Finance, operations, technical teams, and executive leadership.
• Ability to drive enterprise change amid ambiguity, coordinate across business units, and bring fresh thinking rather than simply replicate legacy practices.
• Strong communication, judgment, organization, and accountability; comfortable being both a people leader and a hands-on product partner.

Preferred

• Experience with enterprise-wide transformation, multiple geographies, or product rollouts spanning different operational or regulatory environments.
• Exposure to workforce management, HR technology, payroll, scheduling, time and attendance, or other employee/operational platforms.
• Experience delivering software used in physical operations, including site deployments and software/hardware or device dependencies.
• Hospitality, cruise, travel, or similar experience is helpful but NOT required; diverse industry experience and a fresh perspective are valued.