Senior Product Manager, Data Platform
Job Summary
BlackLine's product managers work at the intersection of business, design, and technology. We are passionate leaders and subject matter experts who learn on the fly, find clever solutions to challenging problems, and make decisions that guide BlackLine's long-term strategy. Day-in and day-out, we work with customers and analysts to shape the roadmap, designers and engineers to build products, and sales/services to take our products to market and deliver value for our clients.
Roles and Responsibility (list in order of importance)
The Product Manager serves as the primary owner for a component of BlackLine's Financial Controls & Automation Platform.
- Research: The Senior Data Platform Product Manager is responsible for constantly gathering information from customers, prospects, peers, stakeholder and other BlackLine teams. They will keep abreast of industry trends, competitive intelligence, market research, and information technology strategies. Research is conducted constantly, through a variety of channels, with an eye on both the specific product(s) that the PM is responsible for and broad, new ideas/concepts. They must produce research documentation and create business model canvas that justifies an investment
- Roadmap: The Senior Data Platform Product Manager solicits and tracks requests from various stakeholders including the BlackLine community, Support, Sales, partners and internal engineering teams. They create, publish, and maintain both internal and external roadmaps. PMs are responsible for balancing new platform components and features, enhancements, design changes, and defect resolution while ensuring that their engineering team aligns to BlackLine's business objectives. PMs will monitor existing and incorporate new data-driven operational and adoption metrics as part of the roadmap planning process.
- Feature Design: The entire process by which data platform features move from idea to reality is owned by the Senior Data Platform Product Manager. PMs create product and development documentation, work with Architecture, Application, and UX/UI teams to refine conceptual models, and consult with Tech Ops, Security, Legal and other internal stakeholders. They are expected to produce detailed requirements documentation which outlines the detailed needs in terms of feature requirements, high level design , inter-dependencis and risks
- Product Development: The Senior Data Platform Product Manager is a part of the platform team and tasked with delivering on both the data platform roadmap and supporting the product roadmap, collaborating with Architecture, Platform, and Application teams across Product and Engineering to determine, plan, deliver and support platform components that will provide the foundation for BlackLine Products. PMs will create stories, participate fully in grooming and sprint planning, and help ensure that the team's productivity, code quality, documentation, and output are acceptable. The Data Platform Product Manager will also assist in managing the team by driving adoption, providing feedback, clearing blockers, and ensuring that all work proceeds apace.
- Subject Matter Expertise: By virtue of their close work with our clients and stakeholders, as well as their participation in the design process, the Data Platform Product Manager is expected to build a deep understanding of the product and market, as well as the fundamentals of accounting, design, and our technology. They will use that expertise in support of other teams, events, and clients. Be able to explain in detail the current data platform functionality and drive discussion to build new data platform functionality
- Leadership: The Data Platform Product Manager is expected to be an informed decision maker who drives projects to a successful completion, always has a vision, and provides leadership for their teams. They are expected to drive cross-functional teams to deliver features and functionality. They should be able to guide other junior team members in performing their task.
PRODUCT MANAGER DUTIES - Drive the vision, strategy, and roadmap of our data platform aligned to user needs and overall business priorities and objectives
- Understand the personas for Data Platform and work on the use cases to achieve reliability and scalability
- Work with users and stakeholders across the company to deeply understand their problems and needs from the data platform
- Partner with platform architects and engineering teams to deliver compelling solutions that meet the demands of users
- Work with Security and data compliance teams to maintain and secure data
- Work with Cloud Engineering to prioritize and operationalize platform initiatives
- Work with the enablement team to roll-out new services and features to customers and drive their adoption
- Define platform performance, adoption and operational metrics and SLAs and track progress
- Facilitate communication with users and stakeholders ensuring they are informed about roadmap progress and what they can expect from the data platform
- Present in company conferences as necessary
- Complete documentation and evangelism of current platform functionality
- Be innovative at work and suggest new solutions to problems by collaborating with others
Required Qualifications
Years of Experience in Related Field:
- Minimum 5 years enterprise application software involvement with at least 6 years of product management experience
- Prior Engineering experience is preferred
Education: Bachelors degree in a technical field or equivalent and/or demonstrated practical experience
Technical/Specialized Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- Experience defining product vision and strategy, identifying user personas and use cases, and documenting requirements and specifications
- Experience in one or more areas: cloud infrastructure, big data, distributed computing, BI and visualization tools, machine learning tools and frameworks
- Experience contributing to engineering discussions around technology decisions and strategy related to a product.
- Experience with open source technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, Presto, Hive or similar
- Able to communicate and work effectively with engineering teams
- Comfortable working in a fast-paced, agile and collaborative cross-functional environment
- Able to influence decision-making at all levels
- Good communicator and storyteller, able to explain technical topics to a non-technical audience
- Experience in delivering high quality customer-facing experiences related to enterprise software.
- Experience with Agile/Scrum
- Knowledge of modern software application architectures, public cloud technologies (GCP) and engineering patterns and practices.
- Familiarity with market and organizational elements of both SaaS and Enterprise-scale Software
- Understanding of accounting and finance concepts and terminology
Other:
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Strong leadership skills with a willingness to make decisions
- Comfort working in both a team environment and in a self-directed role
- Excellent analytical and quantitative skills
- Strong attention to detail and accuracy
- Ability to work under pressure, meet deadlines and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously
Preferred Qualifications
- Master's degree or MBA
- Knowledge of modern software application architectures, public cloud technologies (GCP) and engineering patterns and practices.
- Familiarity with market and organizational elements of both SaaS and Enterprise-scale Software
- Understanding of accounting and finance concepts and terminology
Working Conditions
Work is primarily sedentary in nature and no special demands are required. This role does require periodic travel in order to meet with clients, attend industry events, or support BlackLine-sponsored events.