Senior Technical Product Manager

Grainger Businesses • Chicago, IL

9d • $146,200 - $243,600 • Hybrid

About The Position

We're seeking a Senior Technical Product Manager to help shape the future of Grainger's enterprise data platform. In this role, you'll drive the evolution of our data ecosystem, accelerating the modernization of our platform while enabling scalable, secure, and AI-ready data capabilities. You'll partner closely with stakeholders across Data Platform, Product, Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, Network, and Security to define and execute the strategic roadmap that powers Grainger's next generation of data products and analytics.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Science, Math, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience). Required
• 7+ years of experience as a Technical Product Manager, Product Manager, Engineer, or Engineering Manager (or equivalent experience in a technical product or platform environment). Required
• 1+ years Experience working in a cross-functional, matrixed organization. Required
• 1+ years Experience assessing open-source and vendor solutions, including time to market and total cost of ownership. Required
• Ability to define a clear technical product vision, create effective product strategies, and build roadmaps for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrate entrepreneurial drive and can influence teams and stakeholders.
• Communicate clearly in writing, speaking, and presentations, and build strong working relationships across teams.
• Evaluate Open Source and vendor solutions, considering time to market and total cost of ownership.
• Understand engineering workflows, deployment practices, and facilitate the design of solutions for complex technical problems.
• Seek continuous improvement and innovation, stay up to date with emerging technologies, and encourage creativity and agility.
• Work effectively in cross-functional and matrixed organizations, even in ambiguous situations and under tight deadlines.
• Use strong analytical and quantitative skills to assess relative value and prioritization.
• Guide and motivate team members to achieve results, take ownership of the work, and act with urgency.
• Strong technical background as a data engineer (preferred) or software engineer.
• Experience writing and managing product requirements, backlogs, and roadmaps for internal-facing tools or platforms.
• Experience working on or with data platform teams and familiarity with cloud-native tooling (e.g., Terraform, containers, Kubernetes, GitOps).
• Experience running intake/triage and discovery with internal engineering teams, using support and enablement signals to reduce platform friction.
• Experience defining success measures (e.g., self-service adoption, reliability, support burden, time-to-deploy) and using them to guide improvements.
• Knowledge of the ML development lifecycle and MLOps practices, including model training, deployment/serving, monitoring, and observability.
• Adept at turning technical constraints and user workflows into crisp problem statements and testable acceptance criteria.
• Ability to create practical enablement assets (docs, runbooks, demos, release notes) that help teams onboard and use platform capabilities effectively.

Nice To Haves

• Preferred: exposure to GenAI/agentic patterns and modern ML tooling (e.g., vector databases, serving, observability, distributed training).

Responsibilities

• Learn what engineering teams need by talking with them, watching how they work, and checking what others are doing in the market.
• Work with both Grainger teams and outside specialists to decide which product features matter most.
• Find, collect, and study data to solve problems for Grainger and its engineers.
• Build strong working relationships with people from different teams.
• Turn engineering customer needs into clear requirements and help set the product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
• Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable software.
• Partner with engineering teams on product adoption and achieving desired outcomes.
• Define and communicate the domain-level product vision and strategy, ensuring that roadmaps align with both technical objectives and business goals across the organization.
• Collaborate with Directors / Senior Directors of Engineering to align product strategy with organizational goals and technical vision.
• Lead regular product review sessions with Directors / Senior Directors of Engineering to assess progress, gather, and refine feature priorities.
• Manage intake and triage for Enterprise Data Platform requests, balancing support themes, stakeholder input, and enablement learnings to shape what the team tackles next.
• Align stakeholders on near- and mid-term platform capabilities and how they fit together across infrastructure, tooling, and user workflows.
• Coordinate sequencing and dependencies for platform initiatives so delivery stays aligned with engineering constraints, operational readiness, and integration needs.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leaders to review and update roadmap.
• Continuously incorporate signals from support, platform telemetry, and embedded enablement to remove friction and improve the end-to-end engineer experience.
• Package and communicate platform changes through docs, demos, workshops, and release notes to drive awareness and self-service adoption.
• Monitor and report platform outcomes (adoption, reliability, self-service enablement, support burden) and raise risks/trade-offs early to keep teams aligned.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans with coverage starting on day one of employment
• 6 free sessions each year with a licensed therapist to support your emotional wellbeing.
• 18 paid time off (PTO) days annually for full-time employees
• 6 company holidays per year.
• 6% company contribution to a 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan each pay period, no employee contribution required.
• Employee discounts
• Tuition reimbursement
• Student loan refinancing
• Free access to financial counseling, education, and tools.
• Maternity support programs
• Nursing benefits
• up to 14 weeks paid leave for birth parents
• up to 4 weeks paid leave for non-birth parents.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior