Mattermost provides secure, workflow-centric collaboration for technical and operational teams that need to meet nation-state-level security and trust requirements. We serve technology, public sector, national defense, and financial services industries with customers ranging from tech giants to the world’s largest banks, to the U.S. Department of Defense and governmental agencies around the world. Our self-hosted and cloud offerings provide integrated workflow automation, AI-acceleration, ChatOps with team messaging, audio calling and screen share on an open core platform vetted and deployed by the world’s most secure and mission critical organizations. We co-build the future of collaboration with over 4,000 open source project contributors who’ve provided over 30,000 code improvements towards our shared product vision, which is translated into 20 languages. To learn more, visit www.mattermost.com This is a principal-level individual contributor role who owns and drives the vision, strategy and execution for core product areas, reporting directly to the VP of Product. We are seeking a hands-on and collaborative Principal Product Manager to “operate at all levels” on a) developing and communicating the vision and strategy for core product areas, b) defining and driving the roadmap development in partnership with Engineering and Design, c) interacting with and managing key stakeholders, including department leads and executive management, d) building and driving go-to-market (GTM) plans in partnership with Sales and Marketing. The ideal candidate has 10+ years of Product Management experience, has an MBA, and has either previously founded, or joined as an early employee, of an Enterprise B2B, GovTech or DefenseTech company with exceptionally strong abilities in strategic thinking, communication, developing product vision, storytelling, influence and sales.
Responsibilities
Lead product strategy and execution. Formulate and drive the vision, product strategy, roadmap, development, and launches for core product areas in partnership with key stakeholders across Engineering, Design, Sales, Marketing, and other teams. Engage with executive leadership to drive clarity and alignment with business objectives. Synthesize customer feedback, market analysis, and data into product requirements that lead to more successful products.
Represent our product. Act as a spokesperson for the product, communicating value internally and externally through demos, roadmap presentations, documentation updates, forum discussions, product marketing, and events.
Enable our GTM. Work closely with Product Marketing and Sales Enablement to create the early collateral for our value proposition, intro deck, feature/benefit collateral, and website materials. Train and enable our sales, customer teams and channel partners to tell the story and sell our new solutions. Deliver input and analysis for pricing and packaging discussions led by product marketing, and engaging with cross-company stakeholders.
Instill a relentless focus on buyer needs in value proposition development by building personal relationships with budget owners and champions and earning their trust on addressing their most important priorities. Coach engineering, design and organizational peers on how to develop strong buyer relationships. Ensure we’re building towards high impact value that buyers are eager to purchase based on input from their champions and end users, while steering our organizations away from low impact, niche requests.
Integrate long term vision and near term priorities in product planning and roadmapping. Support engineering, design and peers in sequencing and prioritizing our long term and medium term milestones into clear near term priorities and target state outcomes.
Drive execution of results in product delivery. Lead engineering, design and leadership to align and deliver on monthly and quarterly objectives including customer adoption and engagement outcomes, quality, security and reliability outcomes and shipping of improvements. This includes supporting customer success and product marketing in identifying and securing case study and reference commitments.
Accelerate closed loop feedback in product iteration. Work across our customer organizations to ensure input from buyers, champions and end users is flowing into our CRM, support and product issue tracking systems so that priority issues are promptly and smoothly addressed, with continuous improvement in efficiency, automation and issue obviation.
Lead cross-functional teams across engineering, support, customer success and internal organizations around customer priorities. Ideal candidates can effectively work with cross-functional leaders to analyze, triage and prioritize work streams to deliver on the right customer-centric outcomes in the right order, at the right quality.
Lead external and internal communications on new product lines. Deliver input on new product lines to product marketing for announcements via press releases, blog announcements, and online channels. Contribute to engagement and Q&A with our support organizations on open source, technical and community forums, including GitHub issues.
Serve as an excellent peer and partner to engineering. Collaborate towards a shared vision with engineering, ever raising the bar on value delivery. Don’t be a tyrant issuing orders, nor a dumping ground for accountability.
Requirements:
8+ years Product Management experience.
Strategic thinking and first-principles approach to defining products.
Outstanding writing, communication and influence skills with the ability to influence and flip executive decision makers though careful listening, cogent frames and compelling facts. The ideal candidate is adept at simplifying complex technical concepts into simple and impactful statements.
High impact leadership style working with peers across the organization to integrate source data and first-principles thinking, ensuring input from the right people is heard and addressed, and high impact decisions are made expediently and correctly, with appropriate cross-departmental buy-in.
Strong sense of self-awareness, ownership of outcomes, and continuous improvement. Articulates what’s going well and not going well and takes next actions with clarity, precision and confidence.
Works in a highly independent and pragmatic style.
Strong bias for action and iteration.
Passion for design and usability.
Exhibits a growth mindset. Sees setbacks as opportunities to learn and uplevel thinking and next actions. Doesn’t sleepwalk through initiatives.
Earns trust and empowers peers. When trust is broken, takes steps to rebuild trust by taking accountability and holding others accountable, including management chain, when appropriate.
Travels to meet customers in-person. During peak seasons, expected to travel up to 20-30% for in-person meetings with enterprise and public sector customers, conferences and partner meetings.
Past success in critical infrastructure industries including defense, cybersecurity, communications, manufacturing, or other vital functions.
