Director Platform Product Manager - Chennai - Chargebee

Description

About the Team

Chargebee's Platform Product & Engineering teams are responsible for ensuring our technical platform and infrastructure meets the expectations of businesses who rely on Chargebee to run their most important revenue operations. These businesses depend on our technical platform to be robust, extensible, performant, reliable, stable, secure and scalable in order to process billions of dollars (and Euros, and other currencies) worth of transactions with enterprise-class service levels. Our Platform Product Managers make sure we consistently meet and exceed what merchants expect of our technical platform, working closely with engineering and technical and non-technical operations teams to do so.

About the Role

This role will drive execution across a portfolio of foundational backend and shared services and platform-level capabilities exposed throughout our commercial products. In partnership with more senior product management and our engineering counterparts, this role is accountable for delivery discipline, integration of product-specific roadmaps into an overall platform roadmap, and cross-functional coordination across platform domains.

You will work with product leadership, other platform product managers, engineering leaders and architects to clarify priorities, drive rigor in product artifacts, and facilitate operational alignment across engineering, cloud operations, and other product teams. With your engineering counterpart(s), you will be jointly accountable for predictability and quality product delivery.

You will be a key member of the team developing and evangelizing our product vision, both internally and to our customers, and bridging that strategy with tactical monthly and quarterly work. You need to be comfortable building the case for the vision and roadmap and troubleshooting when things aren't moving forward.

You will also own your own product domain(s) within the overall platform product portfolio, and, in this context formulate a vision and roadmap and drive execution for those domains.

Key Responsibilities

Portfolio Execution

• Own delivery health and execution quality across multiple platform product areas.
• Working with our team of product managers, ensure roadmap commitments are clearly defined, properly scoped, and realistically sequenced.
• Support our team of product managers in the Identification and management of cross-team dependencies, risk areas, and sequencing conflicts.
• Track our KPIs tied to platform health, including reliability, latency, scalability, external capability adoption, and internal developer adoption.
• Communicate our product vision, strategy and roadmap in a way that focuses on the value created and benefits for your customers and stakeholders.
• Lead by example, creating buy-in to a shared vision in a collaborative and consensus driven way; mentor and coach other staff; and be a broad and deep subject matter expert for the platform.
• Solve execution challenges and clear roadblocks preventing us from delivering on our vision and roadmap.
• Work with customer-facing teams (Sales, Implementation, Account Management, Support) to ensure we proactively solve platform challenges impeding our go-to-market strategy and our customers.

Domain Product Management

• Own specific product domain(s) within the overall platform product portfolio, and, in this context formulate a vision and roadmap and drive execution for those domains.
• Define clear product direction for specific platform domains
• Articulate guiding principles and investment theses for your areas of ownership.
• Ensure roadmap initiatives align with long-term vision and architectural evolution.
• Translate technical platform investments into concrete business and developer impact narratives.
• Technical product discovery, including the ability to discover, analyze and understand customer needs (both internal and external), the technical context, and potential solution boundaries.

Portfolio Roadmap Integration

• Work with the overall platform product and engineering leadership team to ensure our vision translates into a clear roadmap.
• Share and raise visibility for the roadmap across the organization, acting as a key interface point for stakeholders across the organization.
• Aggregate and synthesize roadmaps from individual platform PMs into a unified, dependency-aware portfolio view.
• Align the roadmap with our north-star vision for the platform, execution strategy and delivery tactics.
• Translate technical investments into business-relevant narratives for executives and customers.
• Ensure roadmap coherence across horizontal capabilities and product-facing teams.
• Drive portfolio-level tradeoff discussions and escalation management.
• Maintain clarity between foundational investments, feature enablement work, and technical debt.

Qualifications

• Domain appropriate knowledge: e.g., APIs (REST, GraphQL, etc.); AI/Generative AI/Machine Learning; OLTP and OLAP data systems; service frameworks; CI/CD, etc. (Note that a candidate's domain skills will be matched to a specific product domain; we don't expect every candidate to know everything going in, but you should be a fast learner.)
• Systems design and system-oriented thinking: ability to articulate a technical vision in diagram and narrative forms and the ability to see all the parts and how they fit together, both at the detail level and from high altitude. You should be able to understand how each part of a system works with the appropriate level of detail.
• Background in platform product management (or technical program management) and 12+ years of practical experience
• Strong written and oral communications skills; ability to listen and understand what drives people
• Experience working and building relationships in a remote, distributed, global (i.e., across time-zones) company in a rapidly changing business environment
• Ability to work with ambiguity and in gray spaces.
• Strong critical thinking, problem solving and analytical skills; experience utilizing these skills effectively, even without the full picture or complete context
• Experience with ecommerce, SaaS or related software applications running on the internet, particularly with complex and distributed systems and experience with cloud technologies (e.g., AWS, Kubernetes, etc.)
• Experience leading teams with cross-functional membership with members outside your reporting line (i.e., influencing and leading in a matrix organization)
• 4+ years of management experience, or hands-on coaching and mentoring product managers
• Past experience as a software developer or software development engineer in test (SDET) or equivalent technical experience
• Higher education in a technical field (CS, EE, Information Systems) or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated ownership of cross-team roadmap integration in complex, distributed systems environments.