Staff Product Manager

Department Description:

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

What You’ll Do:

As a Staff Product Manager, you are responsible for defining the product vision (lead with the why and think big!), establishing a consistent customer rhythm of business, using data to find opportunities, and building a deep roadmap and backlog that prioritizes the highest value for users. This role requires a servant leader mindset and someone who is both technically capable and highly adept at building strong partnerships that deliver critical organizational outcomes. This role requires deep interaction and cross team dependency management for a portfolio of foundational services and capabilities that enable an integrated experience across several products.

The ideal candidate is technically adept in software and data development lifecycles, Agile and MVP approaches, multi-cloud capabilities (AWS, Azure, Google), AI technologies, as well exemplary leadership and communication abilities (both verbal and written). This role requires you to engage customers of both technical and non-technical skillsets (e.g. Information Workers, Developers, and IT Admins).

• Understands technical customer requirements and can articulate them into technical build requirements

• Deep empathy for customer requirements - both the goods and the bad

• Willing to say no as appropriate when customer asks are not aligned with strategic direction

• Uses data to see opportunities and build hypotheses worthy of prioritization

• Correlates multiple data dimensions to identify patterns that can be transformed into build requirements

• Performs market and industry analysis of trends and conditions for products, platforms, and features for the relevant product line

• Defines strategy, vision, & prioritizes product roadmap

• Ensures business rhythm is established that corrals both customer sentiment feedback, as well as customer data that enables prioritization requests and enhancements for the product line

• Engages with customer and organizational leadership to deeply understand unarticulated needs, successes, and new opportunities; then conveys that information to the team in a manner that is traceable and useful.

• Uses data, strategic direction, and feedback loops, prioritizing high value outcomes first

• Uses an Agile framework, specifically with an MVP and iterative approach, partners and collaborates with engineering team to ensure the right work is prioritized and delivered; communicates effectively to stakeholders

• Brings to bear techniques to increase collaboration, predictability, and transparency for the team while promoting a culture of experimentation and innovation

• Champions organization-wide processes and best practices related to ideation, delivery, prioritization, and customer engagement

• Productively challenges engineering design to ensure customer requirements will be fulfilled

• Uses a lifelong learning mentality, knowing the latest best practices and technologies

• Exercises good judgment when faced with risk, blockers, or tradeoffs

• Communicate expectations to partners, leaders, and customers, and optimally resets expectations as priorities or deliverables shift

• Effectively onboards customers and stakeholders to new releases and functionality

• Plan and prioritize work with our Software Engineering team focused on multi-cloud provisioning, governance, and data transparency

• Work across a team of developers who will design, build, and maintain APIs and services that underpin our products

Required Qualifications & Skills:

• A minimum of 7 years of experience in technical product management.

• Minimum of 2 years of product management experience in building and launching AI products.

• Good understanding of the Generative AI, Agentic development process and ML model lifecycle.

• Able to define priorities based on the OKRs defined by leadership

• Ability to define product success KPIs measuring outcomes and drive business success.

• A minimum of 5 years cloud experience (AWS, Google, Azure) preferred

• Proven experience setting strategic vision, large scale application/data deployments, managing software or data development lifecycles, and resolving issues that impact design, product success, or address future technologies

• Ability to work with large data sets for analysis and interpretation of business results

• Experienced in SCRUM/Lean Agile frameworks with an MVP/iterative approach

• Ability to influence, take calculated risks, make sound business decisions, and resolve concerns as needed

• Excellent interpersonal, business development, and communication skills (both written & verbal for both technical and non-technical audiences)

• Positive can-do partnership demeanor while working with cross-functional teams and business units

• Must be detail oriented, self-organized, and capable of simultaneously prioritizing multiple efforts

• Proven ability to develop and deliver presentations geared for Senior and Executive Management

• Ability to resolve conflict

• Prioritizes work effectively, making tradeoffs as necessary

• Ability to synthesize robust and cost-effective technical solutions against customer requirements providing buy versus build decision making

• Must be detail oriented and self-organized/motivated

• Ability to thrive in a dynamic, collaborative, and fast paced environment

• Models desired company cultural attributes and inclusive behaviors

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience using Azure DevOps for work item management

• Certification in one or more cloud providers (AWS, Google, Azure)

• Products built with agentic AI framework

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience

• MBA or equivalent to post-graduation program related to product management domain.

The hiring range for this position in Seattle, Washington is $145,400 to $195,000 per year and in Burbank, CA $138,900 to $186,200 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.