Director, Product Operations

CoAd helps businesses navigate the complexities of workforce management through a combination of technology, expertise, and human support. Serving more than 17,000 clients nationwide, CoAd delivers payroll, HR, benefits administration, compliance support, workforce technology, and PEO services that help organizations simplify operations, support their employees, and drive growth. Built on the belief that workforce solutions should be integrated, intuitive, and people-centered, CoAd empowers employers to manage their workforce with greater confidence while adapting to the evolving needs of today’s workplace. The Director of Product Operations is the operational excellence partner to the senior product leadership team, reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer. This role owns everything that makes product roadmaps executable: establishing operating cadence and governance frameworks, synchronizing roadmaps across product domains, running the day-to-day partnership with engineering and technical teams, and building the systems, processes, and rituals that enable disciplined delivery and sustained customer retention. This is a strategic operating partner who builds and improves the operating model itself, owns cross-functional execution, represents product operations to executive leadership, and has the judgment to step into ambiguous problems and drive resolution. You will be the Chief Product Officers trusted operations partner—the person they can hand a delivery blocker or organizational complexity to and trust it gets solved. Reporting to the Chief Product Officer, this role requires someone with deep product operations discipline, engineering partnership experience, go-to-market execution capability, and the executive presence to represent product delivery health to senior leadership and board-level stakeholders. Why This Role Matters In a fast-moving, high-growth HCM organization, the difference between a high-performing product team and one that underdelivers comes down to operational discipline. Without it, roadmaps slip, engineering capacity is wasted on unplanned work, customer retention suffers, and leadership has no clear view of what's actually happening. The Director of Product Operations builds and maintains the systems, processes, and accountability that prevent this. You establish sprint planning rituals, roadmap governance, release readiness criteria, go-to-market coordination, and defect management discipline. You synchronize work across multiple product domains so dependencies don't silently break roadmap commitments. You partner with engineering to ensure capacity planning is realistic and delivery quality is high. You give executive leadership an honest, real-time view of what's in flight, what's at risk, and what needs to change. This role is how a product organization scales from heroic individual efforts to predictable, sustainable, high-impact delivery. CoAd is competing to lead the HCM market, and this position is critical to getting there. Key Responsibilities Product Operating Model & Governance Own and continuously improve the product organization's operating model: Build and maintain sprint cadence, planning rituals, governance frameworks, tooling, and delivery processes across all product domains Establish prioritization standards and decision-making frameworks that enable clear, rapid trade-off discussions across competing priorities (customer demand, compliance, modernization, growth) Build and run defect and issue management discipline: Establish triage, prioritization, and resolution processes so unplanned work doesn't silently displace roadmap commitments Optimize product lifecycle tools, documentation standards, and reporting infrastructure for clarity and efficiency Roadmap Alignment & Synchronization Own roadmap alignment across product domains: Keep domain roadmaps synchronized and free of conflicting dependencies; maintain a single accurate view of all in-flight work Partner closely with the VP of Product on strategic prioritization calls and investment decisions Establish and maintain the product roadmap governance cadence; create visibility into trade-offs and risk to executive leadership Drive continuous roadmap refinement and post-launch analysis to identify lessons learned and improve delivery discipline Engineering Partnership & Delivery Execution Manage the direct partnership with engineering leadership: Coordinate capacity planning, sprint coordination, dependency management, and release readiness for both product and platform engineering Partner with engineering on technical debt management, architectural dependencies, and delivery sustainability Establish release readiness processes and launch coordination criteria to ensure quality, customer readiness, and stakeholder alignment Drive structured communication and status reporting with engineering on capacity, velocity, and delivery health Customer Feedback & Market Intelligence Loops Own the operating mechanism for customer and market feedback loops: Partner with Customer Success, Sales, and Support to ensure customer feedback, support tickets, NPS trends, and competitive intelligence are collected, routed, and reviewed on a predictable cadence Establish processes to close the loop operationally so feedback informs roadmap decisions and nothing falls through the cracks Monitor product performance metrics and KPIs; surface trends and risks to product leadership Executive Leadership & Organizational Communication Serve as a primary point of executive awareness for product operations health: Report delivery status, risk, and operational health directly to executive and board leadership Act as the VP of Product's trusted operating partner on organizational excellence: Step into cross-team problems, unblock delivery issues, elevate risks with candor and clarity Communicate delivery plans, trade-offs, and risks in language that drives alignment and action at executive, C-suite, and board levels People Leadership & Team Development Build and lead a Product Operations team (typically Product Operations Managers or Coordinators) with complementary specializations and clear accountability Set team priorities, resolve escalations, and ensure all team members stay coordinated around shared operational objectives Develop and coach team members; establish clear role expectations and performance standards Build a culture of continuous improvement, ownership, and operational excellence within the product operations function Required Skills & Experience 6+ years of experience in product operations, technical program management, delivery management, or product management with a focus on operational discipline Demonstrated ownership of a product organization's operating cadence: has built or run the sprint rituals, planning cycles, delivery tracking, and governance frameworks that keep multiple concurrent workstreams coordinated Direct experience with engineering partnership and capacity planning; comfort with sprint planning, technical dependencies, and delivery coordination Track record of go-to-market execution: has coordinated cross-functional launch readiness for product or platform initiatives, not just tracked it on a status sheet Executive-facing experience: has presented delivery status, risk, and operational health directly to senior or executive leadership and earned trust through clarity and candor People management experience; has hired, developed, and coached team members with different specializations toward shared outcomes Experience within HCM, payroll, benefits administration, or enterprise SaaS platforms strongly preferred Systems thinker: builds and maintains the operating model itself—rituals, tooling, reporting—rather than simply working within a system someone else designed Strong analytical and communication skills; ability to translate complex product and operational data into clear narratives for diverse audiences Operational discipline and attention to detail; comfortable building and maintaining processes, standards, and documentation Preferred Skills & Experience Experience managing offshoring or outsourced development: has personally owned the communication cadence, delivery accountability, and quality bar for externally-built work Track record scaling product operations from startup to growth-stage or mid-market organizations Experience managing multiple competing product domains or multi-product portfolios Familiarity with agile methodologies, Scrum, or other product delivery frameworks Experience operating within a private equity-backed or high-growth organization Background in technical program management, systems engineering, or software development About CoAd CoAd helps businesses navigate the complexities of workforce management through a combination of technology, expertise, and human support. Serving more than 17,000 clients nationwide, CoAd delivers payroll, HR, benefits administration, compliance support, workforce technology, and PEO services that help organizations simplify operations, support their employees, and drive growth. Built on the belief that workforce solutions should be integrated, intuitive, and people-centered, CoAd empowers employers to manage their workforce with greater confidence while adapting to the evolving needs of today’s workplace. EEO CoAd is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breast feeding and pregnancy-related medical conditions), gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, uniform service member and veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws and ordinances. #J-18808-Ljbffr CoAd