Director, Product Operations

SPS Commerce

5d•Remote

About The Position

The Director, Product Operations is a newly created role on our Product Leadership Team and will be pivotal to standing up this important function within the organization. Reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer, this leader will own the ProdOps function end-to-end — leading a team of three while building the operating system that enables the broader product organization to move faster, decide better, and scale further. This role sits at the intersection of product strategy, AI adoption, and organizational effectiveness. The Director, Product Operations should be a self-starter with an aptitude to develop and grow this function. This pivotal role requires a seasoned strategic thinker with strong leadership and communication skills. The Director will work across all areas of the product organization to align planning, prioritization, and tooling strategies in support of business goals. This role demands a dynamic, innovative leader who can drive strategic initiatives while ensuring operational excellence. The Director, Product Operations is a key contributor to the company’s success, enabling it to scale effectively, accelerate AI adoption, and maintain rigor across a multi-product, multi-region portfolio. As a collaborative leader, the Director will proactively partner with cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, Finance, and the broader leadership team to ensure organizational success. Developing and leveraging these relationships will be key to their success. As a high growth organization with growth coming organically and through business development activities (both domestically and across the globe), it is an excellent opportunity for someone to join and be involved in shaping how a modern product organization operates in a very meaningful way. A successful candidate will have sound general leadership and business acumen, technical and analytical skills, hands-on experience with AI and agentic tooling, and a demonstrated ability to think critically as well as build capabilities for organizations.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in business, technology, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Minimum 10 years of experience in product operations, product management, or a closely adjacent strategic and operational role at a SaaS company.
At least 3 years of direct people management experience — you have hired, developed, and performance-managed team members and take that responsibility seriously.
Demonstrated experience owning and improving product planning, PM tooling, or product operating models at scale.
Strong strategic point of view on AI’s role in product operations — you have formed opinions through doing, not just reading.
Proven ability to work cross-functionally at a senior level — influencing across product, engineering, and go-to-market.
Experience managing portfolio-level reporting and resource allocation visibility, ideally across multiple products or business units.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; comfortable presenting to C-suite and synthesizing ambiguity into clear frameworks.
Strong interpersonal skills with demonstrated ability to build cross-functional relationships.
Demonstrated, strong leadership experience.
Ability to develop and motivate teams and provide strategic direction for them.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience building with AI tools today — prompting, prototyping, and deploying agentic workflows in your current work.
Background in executing ProdOps in a global SaaS business with a B2B go-to-market motion.
Familiarity with modern product tooling ecosystems such as Productboard, Jellyfish, Lovable, Claude, and similar platforms.
Educational and professional experience in either a technical or analytical field of practice.

Responsibilities

Design and run the end-to-end signal processing capabilities that ensure our Product Team is highly equipped to identify and prioritize the most impactful capabilities to build.
Build the shared playbooks, templates, and decision frameworks the PM community uses across product lines.
Identify and close gaps in PM capability — especially around AI-native working practices, prioritization rigor, and customer discovery.
Serve as a thought partner alongside other product leaders in evolving the Product Team’s focus, structuring resource allocations, and driving skills development.
Own the product organization’s tooling strategy — what we use, how we use it, and how we measure impact.
Actively prototype and roll out agentic workflows across product research, documentation, prioritization, and portfolio reporting.
Partner with engineering to evaluate emerging AI development approaches and their implications for how PMs work.
Operate as an internal expert and evangelist on the shift to agentification.
Design and own the quarterly planning process across a multi-product, multi-region portfolio.
Build the frameworks and tooling for portfolio-level prioritization — ensuring resource allocation reflects strategy.
Drive the operating cadence: product line reviews, roadmap governance, and OKR tracking.
Reduce planning overhead through automation and better tooling, not more process.
Build and maintain portfolio-wide practices to report on how PM capacity, engineering investment, and product spend map to strategic bets.
Create a single source of truth for cross-product investment visibility accessible to the CPO and CEO.
Instrument leading indicators — not just output metrics — so leadership can course-correct in real time.
Partner with Finance and the CTO organization on headcount planning, program investment tracking, and build/buy/partner analysis.
Own the cross-functional operating rhythm between Product, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success.
Own the innovation launch function, leading and ensuring go-to-market readiness for major product releases and capability launches.
Build bi-directional feedback loops between the field and the product organization — closing the loop among sales, marketing, and customer success signals to roadmap inputs, including return signals to these teams on our evolving roadmap and rationale.
Lead, develop, and retain direct reports — setting clear expectations, providing regular coaching, and creating growth paths within the function.
Establish team cadence, working norms, and accountability structures that model the same operational discipline you bring to the broader product organization.
Allocate team capacity across the portfolio in a way that reflects strategic priority and team strengths.
Serve as the hiring manager for any future ProdOps growth and define the talent profile for the function over time.