Principal Product Manager, Front End Platform

Overview: We're looking for a Principal PM, Front End Platform to own the strategy for the digital platform of the client. This person would make sure the front-end enables best-in-class experiences for every brand and every piece of content, wherever it reaches an audience. This person needs to deeply understand two things: what makes a great consumer experience and what makes a great platform for the teams building those experiences. That tension is core to the role and you should be energized by it. The person should also think about AI not as a feature to bolt on but as something that changes how platform teams build, ship and maintain software. We want someone who's already working this way and can bring that mindset to how we evolve the audience platform. Responsibilities: You're a platform PM. But you're not here to build \"platform value\" in the abstract. You're here because the front end is where readers and advertisers meet our brands. Every decision you make should connect back to that. You'll be the person who holds the full picture: page performance, content rendering, ad product delivery, SEO, design system consistency, accessibility, developer velocity. You'll work across brand teams to understand what they need. You'll partner deeply with engineering and design to figure out what to build and what to leave alone. You'll make hard calls about standardization vs. flexibility and you'll be able to explain why. What you'll do Understand the customer. You have two. Readers who experience our brands through the audience platform and the internal teams who build on it. You spend real time understanding both. You know what good looks like for a consumer content experience across every surface (our own sites, apps, feeds, anywhere our content lives). You know what ad products need from the front end to perform. You don't treat \"the platform\" as an end in itself. It exists to make our brands' content shine wherever audiences find it. Partner with eng and design. This is not a \"throw requirements over the wall\" role. You sit with engineering and design as a peer. You understand front end architecture well enough to have real conversations about trade-offs. You write clear specs. You also know when to stay loose and figure it out together. Have a point of view on what great looks like. You know what best-in-class looks like for a consumer content experience and you hold us to that standard. You benchmark against the best publishers and platforms out there. You have real opinions about performance, page experience, ad density, load time, readability. You set targets that push toward the 95th percentile and you track them obsessively. But you also bring taste. You can look at a page and feel when something is off before the data tells you. The combination of metrics rigor and editorial instinct is what makes this role work. Measure what matters. You define clear metrics for platform health: performance, quality, adoption, developer experience, consumer outcomes, ad delivery. You build dashboards and rituals that keep the team honest. You know the difference between a vanity metric and a useful one. Get comfortable in the mess. Platform work at a multi-brand company is inherently messy with competing priorities, legacy systems and ambiguity about who owns what. You don't wait for things to be clean before you move. You can hold complexity without being paralyzed by it. Think with AI, not just about it. You already use AI in your daily work. You've thought about where AI can meaningfully change platform workflows: component generation, documentation, QA, design-to-code pipelines, smarter defaults for brand teams. You can tell the difference between a demo that looks cool and a capability that actually reduces toil. You bring practical recommendations to the team and you help prioritize AI investment alongside everything else on the roadmap. Stay curious. The front end landscape moves fast. You stay close to what's emerging in tooling, frameworks and AI-powered development. You bring perspective on what's worth adopting vs. what's noise. You read broadly and you form your own opinions. Required skills/experience: 10+ years in product management. Meaningful time on platform or infrastructure products. Multi-brand or multi-product experience is a strong plus. Real understanding of front end technology. You know your way around rendering, performance optimization, SEO, component architecture and design systems. You can read a PR and follow a technical discussion. Consumer product instincts. You've worked on products where the end user is a real person reading or watching or browsing. You understand engagement, retention and content experience quality. You pay attention to what competitors and best-in-class publishers are doing and you bring that context to your team. Familiarity with digital advertising. You understand how ad products intersect with front end performance and UX. You know why page speed and layout stability matter to revenue and not just to Lighthouse scores. Comfort with ambiguity. You've operated in large orgs where the path wasn't clear. You've driven alignment without direct authority across multiple teams with competing needs. Strong communication skills. You write well. You present well. You can make platform strategy make sense to an editor-in-chief and a staff engineer in the same week. You've worked across web and mobile (iOS/Android). You're good with data and analytics tooling. You can define metrics and actually track them. Preferred skills/experience: Hands-on experience with design systems (Storybook, Figma component libraries, design tokens). You use AI tools regularly in your own product work. You've shaped product strategy around AI capabilities and you can point to real examples.