Head of Product Operations & Strategy, Office of the President (Manufacturing Operations)

QAD, Inc.•Chicago, IL

2h•$140,000 - $160,000•Remote

About The Position

The Opportunity: Be The Active Copilot This is a high-impact leadership role for a product leader who wants to operate at GM altitude. You will serve as the strategic co-pilot to the President of our Manufacturing ERP business during a period of major transformation—cloud modernization, go-to-market acceleration, and an AI-native product shift. This is not an observer role. You will sit in decision rooms, drive strategy artifacts, unblock execution, and own outcomes. Who You Are You are a product thinker at heart. You have managed roadmaps, wrestled with prioritization, and shipped features. Now, you want to zoom out. You possess insatiable intellectual curiosity. You are the person who reads white papers on weekends, tests new AI tools for fun, and constantly asks, "Why do we do it this way?" This is not a traditional PMO / Program Manager role. You are expected to have product judgment and be able to make calls. You will be accountable for strategy outputs and business results, not meeting coordination. The Core Mission Your primary mandate is to operationalize the President's vision. You will bring "Product Thinking" to the business itself. You will treat the organization as a system that needs to be optimized, debugged, and scaled.

Requirements

7+ years in product management / product operations & strategy
Former Group PM / Director PM / Head of Product
Has owned roadmap + shipped + carried a business number
Has worked with GTM and knows adoption + monetization
You understand what it means to build in an AI-native world—not just bolt AI onto legacy workflows. You know how to:
Identify where machine intelligence can remove toil, accelerate workflows, or change user behavior.
Work with LLMs, agents, embeddings, retrieval systems, and automation patterns at a conceptual level.
Design products that blend predictive, prescriptive, and agentic intelligence into the core experience, not as an afterthought.
Validate AI use cases through experiments, data, and fast feedback loops.
Apply judgment around AI feasibility, guardrails, hallucination mitigation, and responsible deployment.
Translate ambiguous AI opportunities into clear problem definitions and measurable value.
create agent success metrics (deflection, cycle time reduction, OTIF uplift, etc.)
You have an affinity for complex B2B ecosystems like ERP, Supply Chain, or Manufacturing. You enjoy the intellectual challenge of “hard” industries where constraints, edge cases, and real-world operations matter.
You see a problem and own the solution. You act with urgency. You do not wait for permission to fix a broken process or to propose a better way.
You are comfortable with ambiguity and energized by environments where the playbook is being written in real time. You bring structure to chaos and clarity to complexity.
You leave nothing to guess. You communicate consistently, proactively, and translate across functions—engineering, sales, services, marketing, finance—with precision.
You understand that transformation cannot be run from behind a desk. You are willing to travel (30%) to spend time with customers, shadow field teams, support leadership offsites, and anchor strategy in live ground truth.

Responsibilities

Drive the strategy operating system”
Define & maintain the strategy stack: Narrative → Customer segmentation → Portfolio bets → Roadmap → Metrics → Commercial model
Own the monthly strategy review: tradeoff decisions, kill lists, acceleration decisions
Drive product portfolio governance (what gets built vs stopped)
Predictive Intelligence: Instead of waiting for the P&L to show a problem, you will build "early warning systems" using leading indicators in pipeline, usage data, and sentiment. This allows us to course-correct months in advance.
Cross-BU Alignment: We operate within a larger enterprise. You will manage the diplomacy and connection points with other Business Units to ensure we leverage shared resources and do not reinvent the wheel.
Proxy & Decision Making: You will sit in for the President in critical meetings with the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and cross-functional peers. You are empowered to make decisions, not just take notes.
The "Unblocker": Transformation creates friction. You will identify where the business is stuck. Whether it is a stalled product launch, a sales-enablement gap, or a hiring bottleneck, you will deploy the resources needed to clear the path.
Sounding Board: You provide a safe, intellectual space for the President to stress-test ideas. You challenge assumptions with data and "Product Sense" before strategies are rolled out to the wider team.
AI & Operational Leverage: You are intellectually curious and tech-savvy. You will lead the charge on integrating AI and automation across to increase velocity in all areas of the business.
Information Architecture: You ensure the President is the best-informed person in the room by synthesizing complex data from all components of the business unit into clear and actionable insights.

Benefits

Your health and well being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work-life balance.
Opportunity to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
Collaborative culture of smart and hard-working people who support one another to get the job done.
An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea-sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
U.S. benefits package includes medical, dental and vision coverage, a 401(k) plan with company match, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, paid-time off, parental leave, and well-being programs

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