Director of Product Management - Data Streaming

Job description

HiveMQ is the Industrial AI Platform helping enterprises move from connected devices to intelligent operations. Built on the MQTT standard and a distributed edge-to-cloud architecture, HiveMQ connects and governs industrial data in real time, enabling global leaders like Audi, BMW, Eli Lilly, and Siemens to operationalize AI and drive innovation at scale. At HiveMQ, our culture is Effortless → Empowered → Relentless. We make the complex simple, act with confidence and ownership, and never stop pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Join us to power the future of intelligent industry. The Opportunity We’re seeking an exceptional Director of Product Management to lead HiveMQ’s Data Streaming portfolio — the connectivity and transport foundation that every other layer of our Industrial AI Platform depends on. The core product is our flagship offering: HiveMQ Enterprise Broker, the high-performance MQTT server running at the core of industrial operations at companies mentioned above and more. A critical and differentiating element of the Enterprise Broker is its extensibility system — the mechanism by which new functionality is built in the field, validated against real customer needs, and reviewed, generalized, and graduated into the core product. Managing this well requires two things in parallel: ensuring OT teams can easily build integrations with IT systems without friction, and maintaining a healthy process by which extensions are proposed, triaged, and absorbed into the roadmap rather than accumulating as one-off customizations. The Data Streaming layer faces a genuinely interesting strategic challenge: it is HiveMQ’s primary revenue engine today, but lighter brokers and free-tier strategies from competitors are beginning to pressure pricing in some segments. The response isn’t to double down on features — it’s to make HiveMQ the default substrate for operational agents, the only choice that compounds into Intelligence and Agentic AI in ways no alternative can match. Translating that thesis into a product roadmap is as much a PM job as a strategic one. You’ll start as an individual contributor, with the opportunity to build and lead a high-performing team as the portfolio scales. WHAT YOU’LL DO STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP & VISION - Define and drive product strategy for the Data Streaming layer of our platform with a clear thesis on how and where we should invest to drive our “expert product for experts” to be easier to deploy, easier to manage, easier to configure, etc. - Work with customers, our sales team, along with partners & alliances team to identify key integration opportunities to invest in as part of how the Data Streaming product fits within broader solutions that our customers are attempting to build - Own the product scope and sequencing for the next-generation Core Broker — evolving toward cloud-native, multi-tenancy, and Agent Experience (AX) — while holding near-term LTS and expansion commitments in parallel - Champion AX (Agent Experience) as a first-class design target alongside UX and DX: on-demand broker provisioning via API, OpenAPI specs across every capability, and the “ceremony elimination” heuristic — does this require the user or agent to reason about infrastructure, or does it just work? - Think cross-functionally and ahead: understand how Streaming connects to PLG, SLG, Expansion, and Partner motions, and make deliberate choices about where and how HiveMQ competes in the lower-end of the market - Establish clear, inspiring vision for your teams derived from company strategy, helping prioritize and reprioritize for organizational success BUSINESS IMPACT & ACCOUNTABILITY - Drive measurable business outcomes across adoption, usage, revenue, and customer satisfaction metrics for the Data Streaming portfolio - Own the data story: work with product data analysts to instrument products effectively, measure impact, and report progress toward business objectives - Communicate value effectively through data-backed storytelling to executives, customers, and cross-functional stakeholders - Identify and address organizational bottlenecks, proposing process improvements as business scale demands - Make hard calls: determine when products or features should be terminated if they don’t deliver desired outcomes CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION - Partner deeply with engineering leadership (Team Leads, Directors) to ensure technical feasibility and delivery excellence. As this is the flagship part of our platform, our engineering leaders have strong opinions about delivering mission critical and stable releases because our customers run their entire manufacturing sites and plants on top of our technology. - Collaborate with GTM organizations including Sales, Customer Success/Support, Alliances, and Product Marketing at director and VP levels - Manage strategic customer relationships and handle escalations with appropriate oversight - Build consensus across departments on complex, cross-functional initiatives - Develop and present roadmaps and proposals to senior leadership, occasionally engaging with C-suite executives CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY - Maintain intimate customer knowledge through ongoing strategic customer relationships - Advocate for customer needs by framing capabilities in terms of customer outcomes and business priorities - Validate product-market fit through continuous discovery and customer feedback loopsDrive customer intimacy beyond strategic accounts to understand broader market needs WHAT YOU BRING REQUIRED EXPERIENCE & TRACK RECORD - 8–15 years total work experience, with significant portion in product management or consulting - Track record with established enterprise infrastructure products at a meaningful stage of maturity — products with real revenue, demanding enterprise customers, and significant growth still ahead. You’ve navigated the tension between meeting current customer commitments and making the architectural investments required to unlock the next phase of adoption - Data-driven product development: demonstrated success using quantitative and qualitative methods to drive product decisions - Budget and resource management: experience allocating resources across teams and managing to budget DOMAIN EXPERTISE Core — the non-negotiables: - Message-oriented middleware and event-driven architectures: deep familiarity as PM or practitioner with MQTT and/or platforms like Kafka, Solace, RabbitMQ, or similar distributed messaging and streaming technologies — you understand throughput, latency, ordering guarantees, QoS tradeoffs, and the design decisions that differentiate these platforms in practice - OT/IT convergence: meaningful experience with operational technology environments — PLC communication, OPC-UA, Modbus, SCADA, MES — either through product management, systems integration, solution engineering, or hands-on work in industrial settings; you have credibility talking to plant engineers and IT architects in the same conversation - Smart manufacturing / Industry 4.0: understanding of how manufacturers instrument facilities, manage device fleets, and move operational data from edge to cloud; direct experience with Tier 1 industrial companies in automotive, pharma, energy, or discrete manufacturing is a strong plus Highly valued: - IoT, robotics, or adjacent industrial domains: broader device connectivity experience — even if not pure OT — that translates to credibility in industrial contexts; robotics, connected vehicle, energy systems, or industrial IoT all count - Self-managed enterprise software: experience with products that deploy on-premises or at the edge, including LTS release cycles, version management, upgrade path design, and enterprise procurement realities - 4+ years of people management experience, including leading distributed teams across geographies and time zones - PLG for infrastructure or developer products: track record with product-led growth motions for technical products — trial flows, licensing enforcement, activation metrics, conversion funnel design - Distributed systems: genuine appreciation for reliability, scalability, clustering, and operational observability at scale — not just as features but as customer outcomes LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT CAPABILITIES - Strategic thinking: ability to set vision, define strategy, and execute across multiple product lines - Influence without authority: proven ability to drive alignment across senior stakeholders through data and compelling narratives - Effective communication: creates clear executive-level communications; teams and stakeholders understand priorities and how work connects to company mission - Decision-making under uncertainty: comfortable making and defending tough calls, saying “no” thoughtfully, and adjusting course based on data - Empathetic leadership: delivers challenging feedback and news with honesty, empathy, and understanding - Cultural steward: demonstrates and champions product management best practices and company values TECHNICAL & PRODUCT SKILLS - Product instrumentation: ensures products are measured effectively to monitor impact and progress toward goals - Outcome-focused mindset: cares about achieving business goals, not just shipping features - Risk identification: thinks ahead to identify risks and mitigation strategies - Process design: identifies inefficiencies and proposes scalable solutions as business grows - Stakeholder management: builds and maintains relationships across R&D, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Support, and executive teams [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/ad32601b-1068-4837-bf39-6fb30b020a35/6c7d9580-e269-4ed2-b231-3cf18ec552d8/hivemq_benefits.png] EXCERPT FROM OUR CUSTOMER LIST https://www.hivemq.com/customers/ Informations about our job advertisements Job advertisements of HiveMQ GmbH are always directed at female, male and various applicants, regardless of age, gender, religion, sexual identity, disability, race, ethnic origin, world view, etc. The selection of a candidate is exclusively based on qualifications. For organisational reasons, we cannot return application documents and cannot reimburse any expenses that you incur during the application process.