Senior Product Manager

Role Description

We are seeking an experienced Sr. Product Manager, Technical to lead the strategy, development, rollout, and lifecycle management of YPO’s API platform. In this role, you will own the vision, roadmap, and execution for the APIs that power YPO’s Member ecosystem, Chapter operations, and Agentic AI platform.

You will work cross-functionally with Software Engineering, Product, IT, Data Architecture, and Security to design scalable, semantic API solutions that meet rigorous technical, privacy, and governance standards. You will also serve as the primary product-facing liaison to internal engineering consumers and external integration partners — ensuring smooth adoption and developer experience across the API surface.

This role requires deep technical acumen, strong product leadership, proven experience in API ecosystems, and the ability to translate complex integration needs into clear, actionable product requirements that engineering can build with confidence.

Your API Portfolio

• Member API: Stable, semantic endpoints exposing member profile, identity, peer discovery, and graph relationships. The foundation of member experience.
• Chapter API: APIs powering chapter management, forum operations, event discovery, and role-based data access across YPO’s global regional structure.
• Agentic Ecosystem APIs: Governed API contracts for AI agents (Peer Discovery Agent, Event Discovery Agent) built on OpenAI + RAG and Google Gemini. Only approved APIs. Reasoning must be surfaceable.

Primary Responsibilities

• API Product Strategy & Vision:
  • Define and own the API product vision, long-term strategy, and roadmap for the Members, Chapters, and Agentic Ecosystem API domains, aligning with YPO’s Digital Transformation goals and the V1 Trust Stack.
  • Identify opportunities to expand YPO’s API offerings to support new member products, data capabilities, agentic use cases, and integration partnerships.
  • Implement industry best practices in API-first product development — ensuring YPO’s APIs meet and exceed standards for scale, security, versioning, and developer experience.
  • Champion the Trust Stack principle: if backend data changes break the member experience, the API layer is not done.
• API Product Development & Lifecycle Management:
  • Translate member, chapter, and agentic integration requirements into detailed product requirements, user stories, and API specifications.
  • Work closely with Engineering, Governance and Data Architecture to design GraphQL and RESTful API endpoints (via AWS API Gateway) including data models, versioning standards, authentication mechanisms (Auth0 / Okta), and integration workflows.
  • Prioritize API features, enhancements, and technical debt based on member impact, business value, and engineering capacity.
  • Manage the full lifecycle of API products including development, testing, documentation, versioning, deprecation, and migration planning — with zero implied continuations; every phase requires a new decision.
  • Ensure all APIs expose provenance and explanation metadata so agent reasoning is always surfaceable to the member.
• Agentic Ecosystem Enablement:
  • Serve as the product owner for the API contracts governing YPO’s AI agents (Peer Discovery, Event Discovery) built on OpenAI + custom RAG and Google Gemini.
  • Define and enforce the safety contract: agents consume only approved APIs, never raw member data; every agent integration must include a kill-switch-capable API boundary.
  • Lead discovery sessions with data science, engineering, and product stakeholders to map agentic data flows, identify contract risks, and propose governed API-based solutions.
  • Establish feedback loop mechanisms in API design so agent hallucination rates, task success rates, and cost-per-outcome metrics are observable and attributable to specific API behaviors.
• Developer & Integration Enablement:
  • Act as the primary product-facing technical liaison for internal engineering consumers of the Members, Chapters, and Agentic APIs.
  • Ensure clear developer documentation, sample queries, sandbox environments, and troubleshooting guides exist for every API in the portfolio.
  • Support technical onboarding of new product teams and integration partners by ensuring APIs are self-service, well-documented, and stable.
  • Collaborate with IT and Engineering to resolve integration issues and continuously optimize API usability and adoption.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration:
  • Work closely with Engineering leads to ensure technical feasibility, scalability, performance, and security of all API products.
  • Partner with Data Architecture to ensure APIs maintain stable meaning over evolving backend schemas — frontend experience must be decoupled from vendor-specific fields.
  • Partner with IT and Security to ensure APIs enforce role-based access, chapter-scoped boundaries, and member consent policy (Auth0 / Okta, OneTrust, GDPR, CCPA).
  • Collaborate with Product teams to articulate API capabilities, value propositions, and integration narratives for member-facing features.
  • Coordinate with Engineering and Data to provide technical product insights that support pre- and post-launch discussions across the organization.
• Technical Leadership & API Governance:
  • Establish and maintain API governance standards including versioning, documentation guidelines, lifecycle management, deprecation policy, and design best practices.
  • Evaluate and integrate third-party technologies and APIs that enhance YPO’s member ecosystem (e.g., Elasticsearch, Search Orchestration Service, Kafka / AWS EventBridge integrations).
  • Work with Engineering to ensure reliable API deployment pipelines, observability via Datadog, alerting, and uptime performance standards.
  • Drive continuous improvement to API usability, developer experience, performance, and reliability — with a hard standard: issues must never surface only via member complaints.

How We Measure Success

• API Adoption: Increased adoption and usage of Members, Chapters, and Agentic APIs by internal teams and integration partners.
• Developer Experience: Reduced integration timelines; engineers can self-serve from documentation without escalation.
• Governance Quality: Clear, versioned API documentation; zero undocumented breaking changes; lifecycle plans in place for every endpoint.
• Roadmap Delivery: API roadmap milestones delivered on time and with acceptance test coverage.
• Platform Reliability: APIs meet defined uptime SLAs; issues are detected proactively via Datadog — not reported by members.
• Agent Safety: Zero agentic API calls bypass the governance layer; kill-switch tested and functional for all agent endpoints.
• Explainability: Every API response includes provenance and explanation metadata; no result feels like a ‘black box.’

Skills

• Ability to work collaboratively in a multi-cultural organization with international members, helping them achieve excellence in voluntary roles for YPO initiatives.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, including strong diplomacy skills with the ability to build meaningful relationships with all levels of associates, members, and vendors. Adaptable, insightful, empathetic, and reliable. Great sense of humor and humility.
• Able to maintain discretion and integrity of confidential information.
• Resourceful and able to work independently with initiative and common sense. Effective time management, organization, and prioritization skills with the ability to focus on varied projects simultaneously.
• Possesses a distinct global mindset, sensitive to local and international customs and protocols.
• Demonstrate empathy through active listening and asking the right questions to find the source of an issue.
• Able to identify problems, research alternatives, provide solutions and/or resolve issues in a timely manner. Anticipates member/internal client needs and delivers with clarity.
• Analytical thinker with ability to influence and guide processes with appropriate approach and execution. Natural curiosity and desire to learn more; proficiency and interest in applying new technologies and tools.
• Heightened awareness and understanding of YPO as an organization, team, and collection of products and services.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including proofreading, with a meticulous attention to detail. Adjust communication style appropriately to the audience.
• Professional presence, appearance, and stature to interact easily with YPO members, C-level executives, and peers at all levels within the organization.

Required Qualifications

• 5–8+ years of experience as a Technical Product Manager or similar role, with at least 3 years specifically managing API products or technical platforms.
• Strong understanding of RESTful and GraphQL API design, data modeling, authentication/authorization frameworks (OAuth 2.0, Auth0, Okta), and integration patterns.
• Demonstrated experience translating complex integration requirements into clear product requirements, user stories, and API specifications.
• Hands-on experience working with engineering teams to enable API adoption, build integrations, or manage developer experience programs.
• Experience with cloud platforms (primarily AWS and/or Azure) and modern DevOps and CI/CD practices.
• Familiarity with API gateway and management tooling (e.g., AWS API Gateway, Kong).
• Strong technical acumen, analytical mindset, and ability to understand system architectures, data flows, and graph-based data models.
• Experience working within privacy and consent frameworks (GDPR, CCPA) as a product constraint, not an afterthought.
• Excellent communication skills — able to interface effectively with engineering, data, IT, and executive stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience building or managing agentic AI product ecosystems, LLM API contracts, or RAG-based product integrations.
• Experience with API governance for member-facing or consumer identity platforms where consent and data control are first-class product concerns.
• Background in membership organizations, associations, community platforms, or B2C products serving high-trust user relationships.
• Prior work with iPaaS solutions such as MuleSoft, Zapier, or Workato for third-party integration orchestration.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka, AWS EventBridge / Kinesis) as they relate to API product design.
• Experience working with Elasticsearch or Search Orchestration Services to design search-adjacent API products.
• Understanding of data observability tooling (e.g., Datadog) applied to API performance monitoring.
• Prior experience working with third-party vendors or implementation partners in developing client solutions.

Physical Requirements

• Ability to work flexible and/or extended hours as needed to accommodate members and team members in multiple time zones.
• Ability to travel, domestically and internationally approximately 15-20% per year.

EOE

YPO is an Equal Opportunity Employer. YPO takes pride in supporting a diverse workforce and demonstrates this through its policies and practices. YPO does not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, training, promotion, or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.