Product Operations Director

Role title:
Product Operations Director

Team:
Product Management Operations

Salary range: $160,000 - $200,000 USD

Location:

Remote

Product work at Applied turns customer signals, market context, and technical possibility into clear decisions. In this role you will lead how our product organization applies AI to its own work, own the tooling and infrastructure it runs on, and own the operating system that connects them: the mechanisms, standards, and measurement that turn customer insight into delivered outcomes. You make them repeatable, measurable, and adopted.

• Lead AI enablement for product teams. Set the strategy, standards, and governance for how Product and Engineering apply AI to product operations work. Own the skill registry, connectors, and shared automations. Evaluate and select AI tools, define access and data guardrails, and measure adoption and impact so AI use scales without adding headcount. Build and run training that equips product teams to use AI tools and workflows effectively.
• Own the product operations infrastructure. Be accountable for the connected stack that product teams run on: integrations between analytics, roadmap, customer-feedback, and capability-mapping systems, plus the data flows, dashboards, and automations built on them. Set architecture, ownership, documentation, and reliability standards for this stack, and make it AI-ready.
• Own the product tooling portfolio. Be accountable for strategy, adoption, ROI, and outcomes for product analytics and user behavior (Pendo, including Session Replay), roadmap and discovery (Jira Product Discovery), customer ideas (Salesforce-based PAC/AC Ideas), and other tools. Decide where to build, buy, consolidate, or retire.
• Govern tenant-level configuration and access. Be accountable for subscription architecture, instrumentation and tagging standards, privacy and unmasking governance, access and provisioning, and usage and overage forecasting. Set the standards others follow, automate where possible, and delegate day-to-day requests to the right owners.
• Manage vendors and contracts. With Procurement, negotiate renewals, expansions, and new-tool evaluations. Run vendor governance and quarterly business reviews. Hold vendors to evidence-based outcomes.
• Steward our operating system and run its mechanisms. Maintain and version the operating system with Product and Engineering leadership. Lead the working groups, adoption, and change management for the transition to 2027. Own the central calendar, agenda and pre-read standards, and sunset criteria for ad hoc meetings. Measure meeting load and retire what doesn't earn its place. This includes the mechanism for sourcing cross-functional customer feedback (Sales, Support, CX, Adoption) into annual allocation and planning decisions.
• Standardize how work moves through the lifecycle. Own the min-spec templates, launch-readiness scorecards, and telemetry and instrumentation standards. Hold teams to them, and train product roles on the operating system, templates, and tools.
• Build the measurement layer. Build the data and dashboard infrastructure that delivers the metrics defined with the Portfolio Strategy Director. Own operating-level and how-we-work metrics, such as meeting load, template adoption, and telemetry coverage.

• 12+ years of professional experience, with 10+ in product operations, product management, program management, and/or project management
• You’ve enabled teams with AI tools and workflows (agents, skills, connectors, automations), governed their use, and can show measurable impact on efficiency or quality
• You’ve owned tools end to end: strategy, implementation, adoption, ROI, vendor negotiation, and contracts
• You can design and…