Lead Product Manager

Job Mission:

Own and deliver on a product area while building the product management team’s capabilities, processes, and culture. Accountable for both product outcomes and the growth of PMs on the team.

Key responsibilities:

• Partner with the CEO & executive team to set product strategy and prioritize development objectives across all product areas

• Interface with clients to uncover market problems, test divergent ideas and converge on the best solution that is valuable, usable and feasible

• Drive outcomes by setting the strategic direction (roadmap) and managing the tactical implementation (backlog) for owned product area while ensuring consistent practice across the PM team

• Support launching products in the market, including sales readiness, go-to-market activities and ongoing post-launch efforts

• Build and develop the PM team — hire, coach, and establish the methodologies, rituals, and quality bar for product management

• Represent the product function in executive and cross-functional leadership forums

Product Discovery & Opportunity Assessment

• Runs a continuous-discovery loop (weekly customer touchpoints, rapid experiments, opportunity-solution tree kept current).

• Frames market problems with clear learning objectives, risks & assumptions before delivery.

• Leads the Triad (PM + UX + Lead Engineer) to test value, usability & feasibility early; encourages intelligent risk-taking.

• Combines qualitative insight (interviews, jobs-to-be-done) with quantitative signal (usage, funnel, NPS) to size opportunities.

• Challenges assumptions openly—asks crisp, “what would have to be true?” questions.

• Leverages Generative AI capabilities as a product lever and can identity where AI adds genuine user value vs. where it’s cosmetic, and partners with engineering to evaluate feasibility.

• Owns an outcome-based roadmap that ties directly to company OKRs and 4-lens test (Strategy, Vision, Customer, Business).

• Gains executive & cross-functional alignment through storytelling and visuals; roadmaps are adaptable (reviewed at least quarterly).

• Converts high-level outcomes to measurable Key Results and maintains a visible trace from initiative → metric.

Product Ownership & Agile Delivery

• Serves as Product Owner for an agile process; backlog always reflects priority + class-of-service.

• Sets High-Integrity Commitments (fixed-date work) only when risk-adjusted forecasts support them; meets ≥ 90 % of those dates.

• Collaborates daily with engineering to slice value thinly, ensure definition-of-ready/done, and unblock swiftly.

• Leverage LLMs (Claude Code / Cowork) for user research synthesis, rapid prototyping, and backlog analysis and reporting.

Collaboration, Evangelism & Leadership

• Cultivates trust-first relationships; practices pre-wiring / shuttle diplomacy to avoid surprises.

• Evangelizes the product vision internally & externally; can demo, train, and support customers end-to-end.

• Models servant-leadership: creates psychological safety, celebrates experiments (even failed ones) and elevates team expertise.

• Proactively translates company strategy into product narratives that resonate with every function (sales, CX, marketing, finance).

• Represents the product function in executive and cross-functional leadership forums; owns the product narrative at the company level.

PM Team Leadership & Capability Building

• Establishes and coaches a consistent discovery and delivery methodology across PMs.

• Runs regular product reviews that elevate team thinking (not just status updates); sets the quality bar for specs, roadmaps, and stakeholder communication by example.

• Makes hiring decisions and builds a pipeline of PM talent; creates career development frameworks and gives direct, actionable feedback.

• Ensures consistent backlog health and delivery practices across all PM-owned products, not just their own.

• Creates psychological safety for the PM team; celebrates experiments (even failed ones) and elevates individual expertise.

Required Experience & Skills

• 7–10 years of software product management experience, including ownership of a product roadmap and backlog

• Demonstrated experience running continuous product discovery (customer interviews, experiments, opportunity sizing)

• Track record of shipping software products through a full lifecycle — from discovery through launch and iteration

• Experience working within Agile/Lean/Kanban delivery teams as a Product Owner or equivalent

• Strong data literacy — comfortable using analytics, funnel metrics, and usage data to inform decisions

• Technical fluency — able to collaborate deeply with engineering on feasibility, trade-offs, and system design (not expected to write code)

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; ability to lead meetings, present to executives, and facilitate cross-functional alignment

• Go-to-market experience — has partnered with sales, marketing, and CX on launches and enablement

• 2–3+ years of formal or informal leadership of other PMs, including mentoring and developing PM talent

• Comfort operating at both strategic and tactical altitude — can present a quarterly roadmap narrative to the board and write acceptance criteria in the same week

• BA/BS degree required

Preferred

• • Experience with data integration, interoperability, or iPaaS/middleware products

• MBA or equivalent graduate degree

• Experience with outcome-based roadmapping and OKR frameworks

• Familiarity with LLM capabilities, prompt engineering, and the practical constraints of AI systems

• Experience scaling a PM team from 1–2 to 4–6 PMs, including establishing PM practices, rituals, and tooling

Nice-to-Have

• • Prior experience working within Salesforce or Blackbaud ecosystems

• Prior experience working in the nonprofit sector (either at a nonprofit or at a nonprofit software/service provider)

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