Senior Product Manager, Author Tools

The Washington Post•Washington, DC

1d•$119,700 - $199,300•Onsite

About The Position

The Washington Post is seeking a Senior Product Manager to own the extensions and tools we build on top of our Arc XP platform, along with the bespoke AI tools our journalists use for newsgathering & data analysis to power differentiated journalism. This role owns that layer end to end, from identifying what to build, to shipping it, to figuring out where it should go next. The Washington Post is building the future of journalism through world-class reporting, technology, and product innovation. As Senior Product Manager for Creator Tools, you'll own the layer where our platform choices meet our ambitions. It's a role with real leverage: what you build here can end up shaping tools far beyond our own newsroom.

Requirements

5+ years of product management experience, ideally including work that involved building on top of a vendor or SaaS platform rather than a fully custom stack.
Comfort with technical depth: API integrations, platform constraints, and the tradeoffs of building around a third-party system.
Experience in applied AI, particularly where it intersects with research, content, or information workflows.
Strong ability to manage a vendor relationship as a peer, not just a customer, including negotiating priorities and influencing another company's roadmap.
Excellent written and verbal communication, since this role sits between engineering, journalism, and an external platform partner.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Arc XP specifically, or a comparable SaaS CMS/publishing platform.
Background in media, publishing, or newsgathering, though this isn't a hard requirement.
Experience shipping AI-powered tools, particularly ones focused on research, discovery, or content generation.
A track record of successfully pushing feature requests or use cases into a vendor's product roadmap.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the roadmap for the integrations, extensions, and custom tooling that sit on top of Arc XP, including LUCY, Spaces and future tooling.
Decide what gets built in-house versus what should be pushed back to Arc as a platform request and make that call with good judgment and proper ROI.
Prioritize a backlog that spans quick integration fixes, larger bespoke builds, and longer-term architectural bets.
Partner with Engineering to keep our Arc-dependent systems resilient to platform changes and upgrades.
Partnering with the newsroom AI leads to identify which use cases, automation and tools should be productized for the entire newsroom and/or for Arc XP.
Lead product strategy for the AI tools our journalists use to research, source, and gather the news.
Identify where AI can genuinely supercharge how analysis and investigations get done.
Work closely with journalists to validate that these tools hold up under real, high-pressure newsgathering conditions.
Iterate quickly, since this space moves fast and yesterday's differentiator is tomorrow's baseline.
Actively identify capabilities we've built or need that could plausibly benefit Arc's broader customer base, not just us.
Build a working relationship with Arc's product and engineering teams so those use cases get a real hearing.
Frame our internal builds and requests in a way that helps Arc understand the commercial case for their other publishers, not just our own.
Run the full product lifecycle: discovery, requirements, engineering handoff, launch, and iteration.
Write specs and acceptance criteria clear enough that engineers can move without excessive back and forth.
Monitor adoption of the tools you ship and let real usage data drive what comes next.
Manage tradeoffs between platform-level fixes and one-off internal requests without losing sight of the bigger roadmap.