Product Manager, Specialist

The Vanguard Group • Charlotte, PA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Vanguard is seeking a Product Manager, Specialist to join our team. In this role, you will own and evolve the CXD portfolio operating environment as a product, with Jira at the core. This role is responsible for ensuring that the systems, standards, and rhythms that teams rely on to manage work, investments, and outcomes are coherent, scalable, and continuously improving. This role sits at the intersection of portfolio management, team execution, and leadership transparency, shaping how work is represented, governed, and understood across the organization. A core responsibility of the role is stewardship of Jira as the system of record for team and portfolio management. This includes maintaining and evolving standards for work hierarchy, intake and change requests, and automation, while balancing consistency with the needs of diverse teams. The environment this role manages is not abstract infrastructure; it is the day-to-day operating context that all teams use to plan, track, and communicate their work. The role also owns the design and coordination of Quarterly Roadmap Reviews and Quarterly Portfolio Reviews. These are critical operating system events that drive transparency, alignment, and connectivity across CXD. Through these forums, the role enables leadership and teams to understand progress, surface risks, assess portfolio health, and connect strategy to execution in a systematic and repeatable way. Ensuring these rhythms are effective, trusted, and increasingly efficient is a key part of the role’s impact. As CXD continues to evolve its operating model, including the growing influence of AI on how work is planned, reviewed, and reported, this role plays an important part in challenging and refining existing norms. The focus is not on introducing tools for their own sake, but on thoughtfully evolving portfolio practices, operating rhythms, and system capabilities so they continue to serve teams and leaders well in a changing environment. This is a highly visible role that requires strong product thinking, systems-level perspective, and the ability to balance governance with enablement. Success is measured by the clarity, consistency, and usefulness of the portfolio environment that teams and leaders interact with every day.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field with 8 or more years of experience in product management, product operations, platform operations, or a similar role focused on enabling teams and leaders to manage work at scale.
• Strong systems thinking, with experience designing or improving portfolio‑level processes that help organizations plan, prioritize, track, and review work consistently across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to evolve shared standards and ways of working, balancing flexibility for teams with the consistency required for leadership visibility and decision‑making.
• Experience influencing outcomes in complex, matrixed environments through clear framing, strong communication, and stakeholder alignment rather than direct authority.
• Analytical and operational mindset, with a track record of identifying process friction or visibility gaps and translating insights into practical, measurable improvements.

Responsibilities

• Own the portfolio management and operating environment used by product teams to plan, track, and communicate work from strategic intent through delivery and outcomes. This includes defining how work is structured, connected, and represented so leaders and teams share a common view of priorities, progress, and risk.
• Design, manage, and continuously improve the processes that govern how new work enters the portfolio, how changes to standards are evaluated, and how updates are introduced in a controlled and transparent way across a large product organization.
• Ensure portfolio data remains accurate, consistent, and decision‑ready by partnering with product managers, delivery leaders, and enablement teams to reinforce clear expectations for classification, linkage, and lifecycle management of work.
• Lead the planning and execution of quarterly portfolio review and results review cycles, ensuring these forums provide meaningful transparency into progress, tradeoffs, dependencies, and emerging risks across the organization.
• Own the end‑to‑end mechanics behind these operating rhythms, including preparation guidance, templates, data expectations, review flows, and follow‑up actions, so they are repeatable, efficient, and increasingly valuable over time.
• Identify opportunities to reduce manual effort and improve accuracy through process simplification and targeted automation, particularly in areas such as intake, review, reporting, and portfolio health signals.
• Partner closely with product, technology, and operations leaders to evolve portfolio and governance practices as the organization scales, ensuring processes continue to support speed, clarity, and accountability rather than becoming bottlenecks.
• Help guide the responsible evolution of portfolio practices as new capabilities, including increased use of automation and artificial intelligence, challenge existing norms around planning, review, and governance.
• Act as a steward for the overall health of the portfolio operating environment, balancing flexibility for teams with the consistency required to support leadership decision‑making at scale.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees