Principal Product Manager, Firefly Graph

Adobe•San Jose, CA

About The Position

Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We give everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences! We’re passionate about empowering people to create beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, and transform how companies interact with customers across every screen. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours! The Project Graph team is looking for a Principal Product Manager to lead the vision, strategy, and execution of our Graph platform, a core, highly technical product used to design, visualize, execute, and share complex workflows through graph-based systems. Project Graph powers both an advanced node-based editor and downstream, simplified experiences built on top of those graphs. This role sits at the intersection of UX, systems design, AI-enabled workflows, and platform thinking, and requires deep empathy for advanced users such as developers, technical artists, ML practitioners, and designers. As a principal-level PM, you will define long-term direction, tackle ambiguous problems, and work closely with engineering, design, and leadership to scale a powerful, performant, and extensible graph authoring and execution platform.

Requirements

8–12+ years of product management experience, with significant ownership of complex, technical, or platform products.
Prior experience with node-based editors, visual programming tools, workflow builders, automation systems, or graph-based products, direct or adjacent.
Proven track record of shipping and iterating on sophisticated user interfaces used by expert or technical users.
Strong systems thinking with the ability to reason about interconnected components, constraints, and emergent behavior.
Deep empathy for power users and creators who rely on precision, speed, debuggability, and flexibility.
Comfort working closely with highly technical engineering teams on performance-critical, architecture-heavy systems.
Ability to operate independently at a principal level while influencing cross-functional partners.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially for complex and abstract concepts.

Nice To Haves

Background in developer tools, creative tools, game engines, VFX pipelines, ML tooling, data platforms, or automation systems.
Familiarity with graph concepts such as DAGs, execution graphs, dependency graphs, and scheduling.
Experience with extensible platforms, plugin systems, SDKs, or scripting environments.
Experience shipping products that combine authoring tools with runtime or execution environments.
Exposure to AI-driven workflows, generative systems, or model orchestration tools.

Responsibilities

Define the long-term vision and roadmap for the Graph platform, including the editor, execution model, plugins, APIs, extensibility, and interoperability across products and surfaces.
Define what “great” looks like for graph-based authoring across beginner, advanced, and expert users, including transitions between power-user tooling and simplified downstream experiences.
Lead discovery efforts to deeply understand user workflows, pain points, and mental models in graph-based and automation-driven systems.
Translate complex user needs into clear product requirements, PRDs, and success metrics across both authoring and execution.
Collaborate with design to shape interaction patterns for node creation, connections, layouts, debugging, inspection, and working at scale.
Partner closely with engineering to break down large, ambiguous problems into shippable increments without losing architectural coherence.
Work with engineers on architecture-level decisions affecting performance, data models, rendering, and execution to ensure the system performs well with large graphs and real-world workloads.
Understand and influence systems such as graph execution models, state management, serialization, versioning, and reproducibility.
Define platform primitives that enable reuse, sharing, and distribution of graph-based workflows in different contexts.
Act as a bridge between user needs and technical realities, setting clear outcomes while avoiding prescriptive implementation decisions.