Principal Product Manager, Enterprise Applications

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

3d•$167,200 - $294,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Workday is seeking a highly strategic and experienced Principal Product Manager to shape the future of digital work. This pivotal role involves owning the vision, strategy, roadmap, and product outcomes for critical enterprise productivity and collaboration capabilities impacting thousands of Workmates globally. The position requires leading transformative initiatives across a complex internal ecosystem, partnering with business stakeholders, engineering, architecture, security, legal, procurement, vendors, and executive leadership. The successful candidate will translate employee and business needs into scalable, secure, high-quality product experiences that advance Workday’s strategic goals and operational excellence. This role demands a strong combination of product strategy, enterprise technology expertise, executive influence, customer empathy, data-driven decision-making, and AI fluency. The individual will identify opportunities to responsibly apply modern AI capabilities to improve workflows, employee experiences, adoption, and business outcomes while balancing usability, security, risk, compliance, and return on investment.

Requirements

12+ years of product management, program management, or related experience delivering enterprise applications or digital products.
5+ years of experience owning product vision, strategy, roadmaps, backlog prioritization, and end-to-end product delivery in a complex enterprise environment.
5+ years of experience leading large, high-impact, cross-functional initiatives involving multiple engineering teams, platforms, stakeholders, and dependencies.
5+ years of experience working in Agile, Scrum, or similar product-development methodologies.
Experience delivering employee-facing digital products, such as intranets, mobile applications, collaboration platforms, chatbots, knowledge tools, or other digital workplace capabilities.
Proven expertise deploying or managing large employee communications platforms, collaboration technologies, productivity tools, or equivalent enterprise SaaS capabilities, preferably within technology companies.
AI domain fluency, including a practical understanding of modern AI capabilities, limitations, governance considerations, and responsible enterprise application.
Experience evaluating vendor or SaaS platforms, including AI-enabled products, against business requirements, technical feasibility, security, privacy, compliance, and ROI criteria.
Proven ability to use data, analytics, qualitative feedback, and business context to generate insights, recommend priorities, and drive measurable product improvements.
Strong business-case development and ROI-modeling skills.
Deep understanding of UX principles and the ability to translate employee needs into effective product requirements, workflows, and experiences.
Exceptional executive communication, stakeholder management, and influence skills, with the ability to tailor complex information for technical and nontechnical audiences.
Track record of leading through ambiguity, resolving complex problems, and driving accountability for outcomes.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Business, Information Technology, or a related field

Nice To Haves

MBA or advanced degree is a plus.
Product Management, Scrum, Agile, AI, or related certifications are a plus.

Responsibilities

Establish and own a compelling product vision and strategic roadmap aligned to Workday’s corporate vision, business-unit priorities, cross-company initiatives and product maturity.
Lead strategic engagements with business stakeholders to understand priorities, define problems, build alignment, and develop business cases and ROI models for roadmap investments.
Define and measure product success through adoption, usage, employee experience, operational efficiency, reliability, cost, risk, and other relevant KPIs.
Serve as the voice of the customer for employees and business stakeholders, conducting regular strategic engagements to understand user priorities, pain points, and improvement opportunities.
Leverage AI-powered tools and product analytics to synthesize employee feedback, usage data, market trends into clear problem definitions, product opportunities, and value hypotheses.
Prioritize product features, technical issue resolution, technical debt reduction, and vendor capabilities based on business value, user impact, risk, feasibility, and highest organizational impact.
Translate strategic initiatives into clear product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, release plans, and measurable outcomes for globally distributed engineering and Scrum teams.
Partner with Delivery Managers, Domain Architects, engineering leaders, and other cross-functional partners to drive discovery, proof-of-concept opportunities, technical solution design, and execution.
Maintain current knowledge of modern AI capabilities, limitations, and emerging practices, particularly as they relate to enterprise SaaS products, agents, natural-language interfaces, automated insights, recommendations, and AI-driven analytics.
Identify and prioritize practical AI opportunities that create measurable value for Workmates and the business.
Evaluate vendor and SaaS AI capabilities critically, distinguishing deployable, value-creating features from marketing claims and ensuring alignment with business needs, enterprise data, security, privacy, compliance, and architecture requirements.
Build strong, trusted relationships and influence without direct authority to drive clarity, alignment, accountability, and shared outcomes across a broad stakeholder community.
Navigate and contribute to enterprise governance processes, including security reviews, legal and privacy approvals, architecture governance, procurement, vendor management, and budget or spending oversight where applicable.