Lead Director, Software Product Management

CVS Health•Work At Home-Arizona, AZ

1d•$144,200 - $288,400•Remote

About The Position

Leads software product management for the Security Automation portfolio within Enterprise Information Security at CVS Health and serves as the direct peer and partner to the Lead Director, Security Automation. Together the two leaders run the portfolio: an engineering and product pairing modeled directly on how commercial software organizations operate. Applies commercial-grade product management discipline to internally built security products. The portfolio automates and improves security operations, analysis, and management functions for the Security organization and for CVS Health colleagues, and its users are demanding professionals with day jobs — security operations analysts, GRC and audit teams, identity and infrastructure engineers, application teams, and in some cases colleagues across the enterprise. This leader owns continuous discovery with those users, translates workflow pain into a prioritized roadmap, defines the outcomes each product is accountable for, and holds the portfolio to those outcomes rather than to a delivery calendar. Owns adoption as a first-class responsibility rather than a post-launch afterthought. Internal products fail in a specific and well-documented way: they are built on unverified assumptions, launched without enablement, mandated rather than adopted, and quietly abandoned. This role exists to prevent that. Accountable for internal go-to-market, enablement and documentation, onboarding of successive user groups, instrumented adoption and usage measurement, structured feedback channels, iteration against what the evidence shows, and the discipline to sunset or replace solutions that are not earning their place in the portfolio. Leads and develops a team of product managers, with coaching and craft development as the primary work rather than personally owning products. Sets the standard for discovery, problem framing, requirements quality, and outcome measurement; hires and levels PMs; and creates the conditions for empowered product and engineering pairs to solve problems rather than execute specifications. Operates as a peer-level partner to engineering leadership, a credible voice to security function owners who did not ask to be automated, and a clear communicator to executive sponsors who need to understand what the investment is buying. This role can work remotely from anywhere in the continental USA.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in technology roles, including 8+ years in software product management
4+ years leading product managers, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development — with demonstrated understanding that leading PMs is a different job from managing products personally
Product management experience gained in a commercial software or SaaS organization is strongly preferred; candidates from internal-platform or enterprise-IT-only backgrounds should be able to demonstrate equivalent product rigor
Demonstrated ownership of product strategy and multi-year roadmaps for a software product or portfolio, including the ability to articulate what was deliberately not built and why
Strong product discovery practice: direct user research and workflow analysis, opportunity sizing, assumption and risk testing before committing to build, and evidence-based decision making rather than requirements collection
Demonstrated ability to define, instrument, and report on outcome measures — adoption, active usage, effort and cycle-time reduction, support deflection, retention of usage over time — including establishing baselines before delivery
Track record of driving adoption of software products, with specific, quantified examples including at least one case where adoption stalled and what the candidate changed in response
Demonstrated prioritization judgment under real constraint, including examples of telling significant stakeholders no and managing the relationship afterward
Experience owning requirements definition and the delivery partnership with engineering: problem statements, user stories and acceptance criteria, backlog health, release planning, and in-flight scope and tradeoff decisions
Technical fluency sufficient to earn the trust of engineers and to participate credibly in architecture, integration, and feasibility discussions — including comfort with APIs, data models, and software delivery practice. Coding ability is not required
Experience with build-versus-buy analysis and commercial software evaluation, including vendor and market assessment and total-cost-of-ownership reasoning
Demonstrated ability to influence peers, senior stakeholders, and executives without direct authority, and to build genuine co-ownership with partner teams rather than transactional requirements relationships
Financial acumen: business case construction, benefit quantification, ROI and payback analysis, and budget and license cost management
Strong written communication — product briefs, strategy narratives, and roadmap communication that hold up without a presenter — and strong verbal communication across engineer-to-executive audiences
Experience operating in agile delivery models and with modern product and delivery tooling (e.g., Jira, product analytics, roadmap and discovery tools)

Nice To Haves

Experience as a product manager or product leader for developer-facing, platform, or internal-facing software products, where users must be won rather than acquired
Experience in a security, risk, compliance, or IT operations product domain, or demonstrated ability to learn a technical operational domain quickly and credibly
Experience with workflow automation, integration, or data platform products, including products whose value is measured in effort avoided rather than revenue generated
Experience with AI-enabled or agentic product management: defining human-in-the-loop experiences, evaluating model accuracy and failure modes, and setting user expectations for probabilistic systems
Experience with product-led adoption motions — self-service onboarding, in-product guidance, documentation as a product surface, and community or champion programs
Experience partnering with a peer engineering leader in a formal dual-leadership model, with clear and healthy division of decision rights
Experience managing a portfolio that mixes custom-built software, third-party commercial products, and platform-based configuration
Experience sunsetting or consolidating products, including managing the stakeholder consequences
Experience in a highly regulated industry, ideally healthcare, with familiarity with HIPAA, PCI DSS, HITRUST CSF, SOX, or audit and evidence requirements
Experience establishing or maturing a product management practice where none previously existed
Advanced degree or MBA; recognized product management or agile credentials

Responsibilities

Owns product strategy, vision, and the multi-year roadmap for the Security Automation portfolio in partnership with the Lead Director, Security Automation; frames the problems worth solving, sequences investment against enterprise security priorities, and maintains a defensible, communicable position on why the portfolio is working on what it is working on and what it has deliberately chosen not to do
Leads, builds, and develops the product management team, treating the coaching and development of product managers as the core of the job rather than personally managing products; hires and levels PMs, sets the standard for product craft, runs a structured development approach, and leads by context rather than by control
Owns product discovery for the portfolio including direct, continuous contact with the security practitioners and CVS Health colleagues whose work the portfolio is meant to change; workflow and pain-point analysis, opportunity sizing, assumption testing before build, and validation that a proposed automation solves a problem the users actually have
Owns adoption and the full product lifecycle for everything the portfolio ships including internal launch and go-to-market, enablement, documentation and training, onboarding of new user groups, support and feedback channels, iteration based on real usage, and the decision to sunset or replace solutions that are not earning their keep
Defines and instruments the outcome measures for each product and for the portfolio as a whole including adoption and active-usage measures, manual-effort and cycle-time reduction, support deflection, and risk-reduction proxies; establishes baselines before delivery, reports honestly against them afterward, and treats shipped features as inputs rather than results
Owns requirements definition and the delivery partnership with engineering including problem statements, user stories and acceptance criteria, backlog health, release planning, scope and tradeoff decisions during delivery, and clear division of decision rights between product and engineering
Partners on build-versus-buy and commercial evaluation, bringing market scanning, competitive and vendor landscape analysis, requirements definition for proofs-of-concept, and total-cost-of-ownership and licensing analysis to decisions about whether a capability should be built, bought, or assembled on an existing enterprise platform
Serves as the primary product-facing voice to stakeholders and senior leadership including security function owners, Technology and Digital partners, and executive sponsors; communicates roadmap, tradeoffs, progress, and outcomes in language appropriate to each audience and secures the sponsorship the portfolio depends on
Owns the business case and financial framing for portfolio investments including benefit quantification, ROI and payback analysis, license and vendor cost modeling, and the value narrative used to defend and grow investment in the function
Establishes and matures the product management practice for the function including intake and prioritization mechanisms, discovery and requirements standards, roadmap and release communication cadence, product documentation standards, and the tooling that supports them