Principal Product Manager, Platform

Principal Product Manager, Platform – Fortune Media About the Role: At Fortune Media, we are reinventing how a storied brand adapts to today's digital‑first world. As the Principal Product Manager, Platform, you will own the infrastructure that powers Fortune’s consumer experience. This is a senior individual‑contributor role with full domain ownership: you are the strategic container for Platform, handling complex, ambiguous, or high‑stakes problems and driving stability, speed, and testing capabilities that underpin every experience delivered to our audience. What You'll Own Site Performance & Core Web Vitals Define and drive Fortune’s performance strategy across LCP, CLS, INP, TTI, and overall page speed on web and mobile web. Partner with Engineering to identify, prioritize, and ship performance optimizations that improve user experience and SEO outcomes. Own performance KPIs and hold the bar on regressions, working proactively to prevent them before they reach production. Platform Stability & Reliability Own the roadmap for platform health: uptime, error rates, deployment reliability, and incident response workflows. Work closely with Engineering to triage issues, define severity frameworks, and establish standards for production readiness. Translate platform risk into business impact, and vice versa, ensuring engineering and leadership are aligned on priorities. Testing Infrastructure & Experimentation Own Fortune’s A/B testing and experimentation platform (currently Optimizely), ensuring it is reliable, well‑documented, and effectively used across teams. Partner with Growth, Editorial, and Analytics to define a rigorous experimentation framework: hypothesis design, statistical validity, result interpretation. Drive adoption of testing best practices across the product and editorial org. CMS & Publishing Tools Serve as the primary PM for Fortune’s CMS and publishing infrastructure, partnering with Editorial to understand workflow needs and ship improvements that remove friction. Ensure editorial tooling is stable, performant, and keeps pace with how Fortune’s content teams work. Identify opportunities to modernize the publishing stack to enable new content formats and editorial capabilities. Cross‑Functional Leadership Collaborate with Engineering, Design, Editorial, and Data to define and deliver platform improvements with measurable impact. Write clear, detailed PRDs and technical requirements; work closely with engineers on architecture decisions and trade‑offs. Proactively inform stakeholders impacted by front‑end or back‑end platform changes (Editorial, Ads, Revenue, etc.) before changes ship. Communicate platform strategy, roadmap, and results to senior leadership in terms that connect technical work to business outcomes. Qualifications 7+ years of product management experience with substantial ownership of platform, infrastructure, or technical products at a senior IC level. Technical depth: engineering background or equivalent hands‑on technical experience; ability to discuss architecture, trade‑offs, and implementation with engineers. Platform and performance expertise: strong grasp of web performance concepts (Core Web Vitals, rendering pipelines, caching strategies) and how they impact user and business outcomes. Experimentation fluency: deep understanding of A/B testing methodology at a statistical and operational level. Strong written communication: produce clear PRDs, detailed specs, and crisp documentation; eliminate ambiguity. Stakeholder management: translate complex technical realities into business language for non‑technical audiences and hold the line on platform investments. Analytical and data‑driven: use data to diagnose problems, measure impact, and drive decisions; comfortable building dashboards in analytics platforms. Resourceful and scrappy: figure things out without waiting for perfect conditions. Proficiency with Jira, Confluence, Looker, and Google Analytics. Bonus Skills AI‑forward approach; use AI tools to accelerate work and sharpen decision‑making. Experience in media, publishing, or content‑driven businesses. Familiarity with CMS platforms, editorial workflows, and opt‑in compliance frameworks. Experience with Optimizely or comparable A/B testing platforms. Understanding of SEO and how platform decisions affect search visibility. Experience with observability tooling (DataDog, New Relic, or similar). What Success Looks Like Within the first 30 days: Embedded with the Platform engineering team and established yourself as their primary PM partner; completed a self‑directed audit of platform performance, stability, and experimentation infrastructure; reduced the decision load on your manager by fielding platform questions independently. Within the first 3 months: Owned and shipped at least one meaningful platform improvement with measurable impact; developed a strategic roadmap for Platform that you can fully defend; established KPIs, reporting cadence, and an experimentation framework for platform health; enabled leadership to focus elsewhere while ensuring platform is in good hands. Salary and Location Salary: $165,000 to $180,000 (annual, role depends on experience). Location: New York, NY. Benefits 20 vacation days and 2 personal days on top of 11 company holidays and an honor‑based sick leave policy. Health, dental, and vision coverage (90% paid for individuals and families), flexible spending accounts and HSA contributions. 401(k) plan. Generous parental leave. Dependent care, commuter, and cell phone benefits. Tuition reimbursement program. Commitment to an open, inclusive, and diverse work culture. #J-18808-Ljbffr