Technical Product Manager , Fight Friction

Protolabs•Maple Plain, MN

4d•Onsite

About The Position

ProtoLabs is seeking a Technical Product Manager to own and maintain the product roadmap for an assigned ecosystem area, focusing on balancing new capability development with friction-reduction and quality-of-experience improvements. This role involves translating business and customer needs into clear requirements for the engineering team, prioritizing the backlog, and partnering with engineering leads on release planning and delivery timelines. The Technical Product Manager will also define and track success metrics, coordinate launch activities, and act as a liaison between engineering, Sales, and Customer Success to systematically identify and address friction points across the ecosystem. This includes managing a feedback loop for raising friction issues, reporting on progress with concrete metrics, and facilitating trade-off conversations. The ideal candidate will represent the voice of the customer and front-line teams in engineering discussions and identify opportunities for continuous improvement in friction resolution processes.

Requirements

A degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
4+ years' experience in technical product management, ideally supporting a software engineering team
Experience working directly with Sales and/or Customer Success teams, ideally in a cross-functional, platform, or ecosystem-facing role
Experience coordinating delivery across multiple teams without direct authority over those teams
Product & analytical skills
Comfortable working with funnels, experiments and cost/benefit framing to support decisions
Ability to define clear success metrics and measure product performance against business outcomes and KPIs
User-centric mindset with the ability to balance customer, business and operational considerations
Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders
Able to create clarity in complex domains and build alignment without direct authority
Pragmatic, decisive and impact-oriented: you focus on outcomes over outputs
Must be a U.S. Citizen, lawful permanent resident (green card holder) or foreign national granted refugee or asylee status.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in a platform, ecosystem, or internal-tools product role spanning multiple customer-facing teams
Experience building or running a formal intake/feedback process between product and go-to-market teams
Exposure to complex operational environments where technology, people and process all need to work together

Responsibilities

Own and maintain the product roadmap for the assigned ecosystem area, balancing new capability development against friction-reduction and quality-of-experience work
Translate business and customer needs into clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria for the engineering team
Prioritize the backlog using a consistent framework, balancing engineering capacity, customer/business impact, and cross-functional input
Partner with engineering leads on release planning, scope trade-offs, and delivery timelines; coordinate launch and rollout activities
Define and track success metrics for shipped work, including adoption, quality, and friction-reduction indicators
Partner directly with Sales and Customer Success to systematically surface friction points across the ecosystem — including lost or stalled deals, recurring support escalations, churn signals, and workaround patterns — and translate them into a prioritized, actionable backlog
Act as the coordination point between engineering, Sales, and Customer Success so that friction-related fixes move through hand-offs cleanly rather than stalling between teams, despite having no direct authority over those teams
Establish and run a recurring intake and feedback loop (e.g., regular syncs, a shared submission process, or office hours) so Sales and Customer Success have a known, reliable channel for raising friction issues rather than relying on ad hoc escalation
Report on friction-reduction progress using concrete before/after metrics (e.g., ticket volume, time-to-resolution, deal-blocking issues resolved, repeat-escalation rate), and communicate that progress back to Sales, Customer Success, and engineering leadership
Facilitate trade-off conversations when friction-reduction priorities compete with other roadmap commitments, ensuring decisions and rationale are visible to all stakeholders
Represent the voice of the customer and front-line teams in engineering planning and prioritization discussions
Identify opportunities for continuous improvement in how the team identifies, triages, and resolves ecosystem friction.