Technical Product Manager , Fight Friction
About The Position
ProtoLabs is seeking a Technical Product Manager to own and maintain the product roadmap for an assigned ecosystem area. This role focuses on balancing new capability development with friction-reduction and quality-of-experience improvements. The ideal candidate will translate business and customer needs into clear requirements for the engineering team, prioritize the backlog, and partner with engineering leads on release planning and delivery timelines. A key aspect of this role is to systematically identify and address friction points across the ecosystem by partnering directly with Sales and Customer Success teams. This involves defining and tracking success metrics, coordinating hand-offs between teams, establishing feedback loops, and reporting on progress with concrete metrics. The Technical Product Manager 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
- Collaboration & communication
- 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.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and total rewards package
- Health Insurance: Traditional OR High Deductible plan
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Health Savings Account (including employer contributions)
- Dental and Vision
- Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance
- Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
- Paid caregiver leave
- At least 3 weeks of PTO + Wellness + Holiday Pay + Volunteer Hours
- 401k with company match and immediate vest
- Employee Stock Purchase Program at a discounted rate
- Matching grants through Protolabs foundation
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
