Director of Product Management

Title: Director of Product Management

Location: Houston, Texas

Type: Direct Hire

Salary: Depends on Experience

Summary:

The Director of Produce Management will own the transformation of the internal software platform from a legacy system into a modern, scalable, user-centered product. This role is accountable for setting a pragmatic modernization strategy, sequencing change without disrupting customers, and driving measurable improvements in usability, performance, reliability, and business value. You will lead the software through a multi-phase evolution (e.g., stabilize → simplify → evolve), balancing near-term customer needs with long-term platform transformation. You’ll operate as a strategic product leader who is also highly effective in execution—leveraging Agile practices, Azure DevOps, and AI-enabled tools to accelerate discovery, documentation, and delivery.

Duties:

- Define and own a phased modernization strategy and roadmap for the new software, aligned to business priorities and customer impact.

- Balance innovation with continuity—modernize without disrupting pharmacy operations and customer workflows.

- Partner closely with engineering leadership to align product direction with architectural evolution, platform constraints, and sequencing.

- Identify high-friction workflows and legacy constraints through stakeholder interviews, user research, data/analytics, and AI-assisted insights.

- Translate insights into a prioritized roadmap that delivers immediate value while enabling future-state flexibility.

- Establish a clear product narrative that explains what changes, when, and why (internally and externally as appropriate).

- Make explicit, well-communicated trade-offs between technical debt reduction, platform investments, and new feature development.

- Maintain a transparent prioritization approach that accounts for customer impact, operational risk, engineering effort, and strategic value.

- Drive clarity on what is being stabilized vs. rebuilt vs. deferred—and the rationale.

Execution Excellence (Agile Azure DevOps)

- Ensure product execution within Agile frameworks (Scrum, SAFe, or similar) to drive predictable delivery and throughput.

- Build and maintain a high-quality backlog in Azure DevOps, ensuring:

- Clear epic/feature/story hierarchy

- Strong acceptance criteria and supporting documentation

- Traceability from business outcomes to delivered work

- Actively participate in (and help elevate) sprint planning, backlog refinement, reviews, and retrospectives.

- Partner with engineering to break modernization initiatives into incremental, low-risk releases.

- Align executives and functional leaders on modernization strategy, sequencing, timelines, risks, and trade-offs.

- Provide clear, data-driven updates using product metrics, roadmap communication, and delivery visibility.

- Build trust across business and technical teams by translating complex platform realities into actionable decisions.

- Define and track KPIs tied to modernization (e.g., task completion time, performance, defect rates, reliability, usability indicators).

- Leverage AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude) to accelerate discovery, documentation creation, backlog refinement, and decision-making.

- Drive a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement—improving both customer outcomes and developer velocity.

What Success Looks Like (First 12 Months)

- A clear, phased modernization roadmap (stabilize → simplify → evolve) with measurable outcomes.

- Reduction in key user pain points across core pharmacy workflows.

- Improved system performance, reliability, and usability metrics.

- Increased delivery predictability and team throughput using Agile best practices.

- Strong Azure DevOps hygiene and visibility (clear backlog, priorities, and execution readiness).

- Demonstrated, practical use of AI tools to improve speed/quality of discovery, documentation, and prioritization.

- Visible progress reducing legacy constraints and improving developer velocity.

- A pragmatic product leader experienced in modernizing legacy platforms without disrupting customers.

- Strong at balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution in complex, high-stakes environments.

- Confident making hard prioritization calls—knowing when to improve vs. rebuild.

- Comfortable operating cross-functionally with engineering, operations, customer-facing teams, and leadership.

- Highly skilled in translating ambiguous needs and legacy constraints into clear product increments and outcomes.

- Adept at using AI tools to improve productivity and insight generation (not as a gimmick, but as a workflow advantage).     

Requirements:

- 10 years in product management, including ownership of complex or legacy platforms.

- 3 years leading modernization and/or platform transformation of a production system with active customers.

- Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps for backlog management and delivery execution.

- Strong experience working in Agile environments (Scrum, SAFe, or similar).

- Demonstrated ability to own delivery accountability in environments without a formal PMO — including sequencing work, tracking commitments to named owners and dates, escalating blockers proactively within defined SLAs, and producing concise delivery visibility for executive stakeholders.

- Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI-enabled tools into product workflows to improve efficiency and decision-making.

- Experience managing or modernizing a product toward a SaaS or cloud-delivered model, including understanding of multi-tenant architecture implications for product decisions.

- Comfortable communicating product changes and modernization progress directly to customers or customer-facing teams in plain, trust-building language.