Director, Product Management — Infrastructure Automation

Job description

Perforce is a community of collaborative experts, problem solvers, and possibility seekers who believe work should be both challenging and fun. We are proud to inspire creativity, foster belonging, support collaboration, and encourage wellness. At Perforce, you’ll work with and learn from some of the best and brightest in business. Before you know it, you’ll be in the middle of a rewarding career at a company headed in one direction: upward. With a global footprint spanning more than 80 countries and including over 75% of the Fortune 100, Perforce Software, Inc. is trusted by the world’s leading brands to deliver solutions for the toughest challenges. The best run DevOps teams in the world choose Perforce. **Position Summary:** Director, Product Management to lead product management for Perforce’s infrastructure automation business. This position will report to VP Product. Your mandate is to build a growth engine for infrastructure automation in the AI era, and to bring compliance and controls to infrastructure. At Perforce, product management runs on an AI-enabled operating model, and you will lead your team in it. You will own the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for the platform across its full lifecycle, and lead a team of 5–6 senior product managers. You will partner closely with Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and the broader Perforce portfolio to drive adoption, retention, and growth. **About the Product:** The product is Perforce’s desired-state automation platform. It helps teams manage infrastructure wherever it is hosted, from the data center to the cloud, by automating repetitive tasks and configuration to prevent drift and reduce manual effort. Customers define custom policies, enforce them continuously, and automate reporting for audits, making the platform a trusted choice for security and compliance. More than 40,000 organizations rely on it to keep their systems in a desired state. **Responsibilities:** ### Product Strategy and Vision: - Define and own the product vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for the platform, aligned with Perforce portfolio direction and business goals. - Identify and prioritize investments across the core business and new opportunities, including where AI can change what the platform is responsible for in customers’ infrastructure operations. - Establish clear outcomes and success metrics for every major initiative, and hold the team accountable to measurable customer and business results. ### Leadership and Team Management: - Lead, coach, and develop a team of 5–6 senior product managers, setting clear ownership and a high bar for quality. - Build a culture of discovery, evidence-based decision making, and clear communication, including surfacing risks and bad news early. - Hire and retain top product talent, and add specialist skills where the problem demands them. ### Product Development Lifecycle: - Oversee the product development lifecycle from discovery through launch and post-release outcome review, partnering with Engineering to deliver on commitments. - Ensure problems are validated with customers before significant build investment, and that features ship with the instrumentation needed to measure their effect, including in on-premise deployments. - Drive cross-functional alignment on release planning, packaging, pricing, and go-to-market readiness. ### Customer and Market Engagement: - Engage directly with customers, partners, and the open source and DevOps community to understand needs and validate direction. - Partner with Sales, Customer Success, and Support to turn customer signal into roadmap decisions and to ensure customers realize the business value they bought. - Track the competitive landscape and analyst perspectives, and shape the product’s positioning and differentiation in the market. ### Innovation and Thought Leadership: - Evaluate emerging technologies and trends in infrastructure automation, security, compliance, and AI-assisted operations. - Represent the product externally as a thought leader at industry events, with customers, and with analysts. - Identify partnership, ecosystem, and build/buy opportunities that strengthen the product’s long-term position. ### Requirements: - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field. - 8+ years of experience in product management, with at least 3 years in a leadership role within the DevOps, cloud, or software development space. - Proven track record of delivering complex enterprise software solutions from concept to launch. - Extensive experience managing and growing product teams, with a demonstrated ability to lead and motivate cross-functional teams. - Strong background in Agile development methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) and working closely with engineering teams. - Exceptional strategic thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities. - Strong technical acumen, with the ability to collaborate with engineering teams on architectural and technical discussions. - Deep understanding of DevOps practices, including configuration management, infrastructure as code (IaC), continuous integration and delivery, and containerization (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker). - Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Expertise in product lifecycle management tools (e.g., Jira, Confluence, Aha!). - Strong customer-centric mindset with an ability to understand market needs and translate them into actionable product solutions. - Demonstrated experience defining and shipping AI-powered product capabilities (for example generative AI or agentic automation), including how they are evaluated, governed, and measured in production. - Experience leading product managers in an AI-enabled product management operating model, where AI is used across discovery, specification, and delivery, and every artifact still has a named human owner accountable for its quality. ### Preferred Qualifications: - Experience with Puppet, Ansible, Chef, Terraform, or similar infrastructure automation platforms. - Experience with open-source business models and on-premise and hybrid enterprise deployments. - Experience selling to or building compliance and security-driven buyers. - Experience bringing AI into infrastructure operations, such as AI-assisted authoring, remediation, or compliance, and a point of view on how AI changes what an automation product is responsible for. - Familiarity with AI product risks: accuracy and evaluation, guardrails and human approval, data privacy, and customer trust in on-premise and regulated environments. - Experience building or adopting an AI PM operating model: defined agent roles, evidence standards, review gates, and measures of the team’s speed and quality of learning. - Proven leadership presence with the ability to influence and engage at all levels of the organization. - Highly collaborative with a strong sense of ownership and accountability. - Passionate about DevOps, automation, and delivering high-value products that solve real-world customer problems.