Director of Product Management - Media & Publishing - Onsite

Washington, United States

In a world of noise, we find the signal — the pulse of potential. We weave the strands of talent, vision, and purpose into organizations that endure. Blending intelligence with intuition, we honor the human art of connection at the heart of every great company.

About the Job

We are partnered with a fast-growing, multi-brand local media company on the search for its Director of Product Management. The company is building the technology backbone that powers independent local media and community-building services across a growing portfolio of markets, including city publications, an events and ticketing platform, podcasts, and productions. As it expands into new revenue streams and cities, it needs a leader who can turn a patchwork of publishing, membership, and ticketing tools into a coherent, scalable technical product strategy.

This leader will own the vision, roadmap, and execution for the company's core technology stack, spanning the CMS and publishing platform, subscriber and member identity, CRM, advertising technology, and ticketing systems. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role: setting technical product strategy at the executive level while staying close enough to the details to write a clear spec, evaluate a vendor contract, or unblock an integration.

The role partners daily with content, advertising, membership, and events leaders across all brands, and with external vendors and platform partners, to make sure the technology serves both readers and the business as the company scales from a single-market operation into a multi-locale multimedia company. This leader makes build-vs-buy calls, owns vendor relationships, and is accountable for whether the company's technical bets pay off.

The role has direct involvement at the C-suite level, working closely with executive leadership to set and defend technical product strategy as a company-wide priority.

The Mandate

This organization is clear about what it is—and is not—seeking.

They are not looking for a product manager who writes tickets and waits for direction, or a platform administrator who keeps the current tools running.

They are seeking a technical product leader: someone who can set a multi-year platform strategy across publishing, membership, ticketing, and ad tech, make build-vs-buy and vendor calls with real budget consequences, and stay hands-on enough to write the spec and unblock the integration personally.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the multi-year technical product vision and roadmap across the company's publishing, membership, ticketing, and advertising technology stack, and translate that vision into a prioritized, resourced execution plan
• Lead the strategy, selection, and optimization of the core platform stack, including the CMS/publishing platform (Newspack), subscription and membership management (Piano), CRM and marketing automation (Hub Spot), ad tech (Broadstreet), and app publishing (Pugpig), across current and future markets
• Own reader and member identity architecture across all brands, enabling a unified view of subscribers, members, and donors, and powering personalization, retention, and B2B CRM use cases
• Partner with arts, retail, and hospitality partners to scale the membership program, prioritizing fraud mitigation, real-time redemption tracking, and instant issuance of dozens of partner perks a month across the company's footprint of cities
• Evaluate, negotiate, and manage ticketing platform relationships (e.g., Bandwango, Ticketmaster, or comparable providers), with a strong bias toward the company retaining ownership of customer and transaction data
• Write clear, well-reasoned product specs, business cases, and roadmap documents that align technical and non-technical stakeholders, from engineering partners to the executive team, around priorities and trade-offs
• Own vendor and technical partner relationships end-to-end: contract negotiation, performance management, and build-vs-buy decisions balanced against budget, timeline, and long-term platform strategy
• Partner cross-functionally with editorial, advertising, membership, and events leaders across all brands and the ticketing business to surface and prioritize product opportunities
• Establish metrics frameworks and reporting that connect technical product decisions to business outcomes (reader growth, retention, membership redemption, ad yield) and use that data to drive…