Principal Product Manager, Project Graph

Adobe • San Jose, CA

5d

About The Position

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.

Benefits

• At Adobe, you will be immersed in an exceptional work environment that is recognized around the world.
• You will also be surrounded by colleagues who are committed to helping each other grow through our unique Check-In approach where ongoing feedback flows freely.
• comprehensive benefits programs

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed