Sr. Director, Product Operations

Responsibilities

• Timekeeping and effort categorization: establish governance for time tracking and reporting, ensuring accurate project hours and effort classification for portfolio insights.
• Budget analytics: lead portfolio forecasting, tracking, and reporting; conduct variance analysis, scenario planning, and product margin reviews with Product Leadership and Finance.
• Operational performance: define dashboards, KPIs, and OKRs to illuminate throughput, quality, customer value, and financial results.
• Productivity tracking: document baseline productivity across product teams, enable scalable tooling, and monitor productivity gains against industry benchmarks.
• Staffing and capacity: own the product staffing model, capacity planning, and allocations across product lines; set utilization targets and coverage plans for key initiatives.
• Systematize and automate: optimize processes and systems to improve efficiency, quality, and cycle time; oversee AI-based tool adoption for productivity gains.
• Portfolio retrospectives: establish a cadence of portfolio retrospectives to identify churn, remove bottlenecks, and scale repeatable patterns.
• Delivery practices: refine and enforce standard practices for PM, design, and development with clear acceptance criteria and release cadences.
• Project management ownership: oversee project and program management practices, standardizing intake, planning, execution, and delivery with defined stage gates and artifacts.
• Agile maturity: drive pragmatic scaled agile governance across portfolio segments, implementing streamlined ceremonies, cadences, and metrics.
• Portfolio visibility: implement tooling and processes that provide transparent roadmaps, dependencies, risks, milestones, and cross-functional communication.
• Delivery assurance: monitor progress, address delivery risks and scope changes, and communicate status and recovery plans.
• Engineering partnership: collaborate closely with Engineering, Architecture, Data/Infrastructure, and Security to champion feasibility, scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Technical standards: establish consistent practices for technical documentation, integration specs, contract management, and promote testability and observability.
• Evidence-based decisions: provide data-driven insights that guide prioritization, trade-offs, and investment decisions and embed analytics into operating rhythms.
• Dashboards and reporting: partner with Research & Analytics and Business Data Analytics to build dashboards (velocity, predictability, adoption, cost-to-serve, utilization) and performance reports.
• Customer voice: create clear pathways for Product Managers to source customer feedback from users, research, support, and sales into backlogs and multi-quarter plans.
• Central orchestration: serve as a central contact across Product, Product Marketing, Research, Sales, Support, and Finance for end-to-end delivery.
• Prioritization forums: ensure structured feedback loops and transparent decision rationale, dependencies, and resourcing constraints.
• Executive communication: convey plans, status, and outcomes to executives and align on operating rhythms and shared goals.
• Annual and quarterly planning: partner with senior product leaders on annual planning, portfolio prioritization, and resource strategy aligned to company objectives.
• Roadmap stewardship: assist in building and maintaining product roadmaps and multi-quarter plans, ensuring operational execution aligns with strategy.
• Innovation and focus: leverage insights to identify opportunities for innovation, simplification, and targeted offerings across the portfolio.
• K–12 compliance: ensure processes and tooling meet FERPA, COPPA and district security requirements within product operations.
• Risk management: collaborate with QA and Security to manage quality, security, and compliance scope and minimize defects and risk through governance and measurement.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in business, technology, or related field; MBA or equivalent experience preferred.
• 10+ years of experience in product operations, program or project management, or related roles within SaaS or technology organizations.
• 5+ years leading Agile environments (Scrum or Kanban; SAFe experience is a plus).
• Proven track record managing Technical Product Managers and running large-scale product operations or PMO.
• Ability to translate customer feedback into roadmaps that improve adoption and outcomes.
• Proficiency with Jira and Confluence; experience with portfolio-level workflows and reporting is required.
• Experience with analytics or BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or Looker.
• Familiarity with planning and resource tools like Smartsheet or Airtable.

Technologies

• Jira
• Confluence
• Tableau
• Power BI
• Looker
• Smartsheet
• Airtable

Benefits

• Home or remote office setup reimbursement

Remote First Work Environment

Our remote first culture offers flexibility and trust to balance work with life. It values results and collaboration across locations and requires a reliable internet connection for remote work, whether occasional or permanent.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Cambium Learning Group is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without discrimination based on race, color, age, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, veteran status, disability, or genetic information. Reasonable accommodations are available during the recruitment process upon request.