Product Strategy and Operations Lead

Rippling•San Francisco, CA

6h•Onsite

About The Position

As a Product Strategy and Operations Lead, you’ll work closely with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, and Design to establish and continuously improve the operational systems that connect product strategy to execution. This is a unique opportunity to lead a high-impact team helping Rippling deliver innovation at scale while driving operational excellence across the product development lifecycle. We're looking for a leader to build and run Rippling's Product Strategy & Operations function. This is a senior, cross-functional role that sits at the heart of the EPD organization and works in close partnership with the CPO, CTO, EPD Leads, GTM leadership, and Finance. You will be responsible for three core pillars: building the rigor necessary to sustain a high-velocity of product releases, establishing the measurement infrastructure to validate product success post-launch, and designing the planning systems that ensure our product roadmap remains aligned with our strategic objectives. This is a strategic leadership position for someone who thinks deeply about products and markets, but obsesses about building world-class operating systems, and uses data to drive decisions that matter.

Requirements

10+ years in product operations, business operations, strategy, or a closely adjacent function inside a high-growth technology company.
Ability to understand complex, technical products and articulate their value to non-technical audiences.
Deep familiarity with the full software development lifecycle — you understand how EPD teams plan, build, and ship, and have experience improving those processes.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment. Demonstrated ability to work independently, autonomously, and cross-functionally.
Passion for structuring and solving highly ambiguous strategic problems and owning end-to-end execution of solutions.
Experience leading complex, cross-functional projects with multiple functional stakeholders.
Past experience working at the intersection of product and go-to-market teams in a software company.
Strong oral and written communication skills, with a proven ability to work effectively with multiple, cross-functional stakeholders, including users.

Responsibilities

Run planning for Rippling EPD. You'll own and execute how Rippling EPD does annual planning including multiple offshoot workstreams, and the frameworks leadership uses to make decisions. Continuous improvement of existing processes, automating manual workflows and helping us redesign lighter ways to do the work in the future
Own EPD business rhythms: weekly operating reviews, monthly business reviews, planning cycles, and roadmap processes by defining minimum viable process for each.
Establish critical processes that govern the product development lifecycle. This role owns the health of the product development lifecycle: how requirements move into build, how releases are planned and validated, how experimentation (A/B testing) is designed and read out, and how quality is verified before anything reaches go to market teams and customers.
Ensure Product releases flow into our Launch Calendar and accelerate the pace and quality of releases to market.
Establish a product adoption framework — a structured post-launch process that goes beyond the launch to ensure new features and products are actually adopted, drive the intended business outcomes, and generate learnings that feed the next iteration.
Develop and maintain go-to-market and customer feedback loops that give product leaders a continuously updated view of the market landscape.
Partner with Data Engineering and Data Science to ensure the analytical infrastructure (data pipelines, warehouse models, tooling) supports the speed of analysis our business requires.
Partner with EPD leads to maintain team health, capacity visibility, and resource allocation so that the right bets are properly staffed and execution risk is surfaced early.
Own end-to-end release management, including readiness reviews, release communications, and risk mitigation.
Success depends on the individual’s ability to work cross-functionally and hold engineering, product, and design partners accountable to committed deliverables without formal authority over them.