Product Operations Manager in Durham

The Product Operations Manager is a high-impact role at the center of the product team's strategy and operations. You will effectively serve as the Chief of Staff to the CPO and Product Leadership Team. You will serve as a trusted strategic partner and force multiplier for the CPO — helping drive efficiency, leveraging AI, across the product leadership team, and ensuring the organization moves with speed and clarity on the priorities that matter most. This role focuses on building the systems, processes, and insights that empower product managers, marketers, and designers to make better decisions, faster. This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of strategy and execution, operates with exceptional judgment, and can seamlessly shift between high-level thinking and detailed operational work. This person should also be technically savvy and an AI savant.

Key Responsibilities and Activities:

• Strategic Partnership
  • Serve as a thought partner to the CPO on organizational effectiveness
  • Prepare material for board meetings, high-stakes external engagements, and internal communication
  • Synthesize complex information from across the business and surface the most critical insights for the product leadership team
• Product Leadership Operations
  • Own the CPO's strategic agenda — ensuring time, energy, and attention are allocated to the highest-priority opportunities
  • Drive the rhythm of the business: quarterly planning cycles, team offsights, all-hands meetings, and leadership team cadences
  • Maintain visibility into cross-functional dependencies and proactively surface blockers or misalignments
  • Help the product org adopt new ways of working, ensuring smooth rollout of new frameworks, rituals, and processes
  • Design and scale repeatable practices that drive clarity and focus
  • Standardize rituals (e.g., product reviews, quarterly planning, OKRs) to increase transparency and alignment
  • Engage with team members to identify bottlenecks early and raise risks
  • Facilitate alignment across the leadership team, including managing follow-through on leadership team decisions
• Tooling, Data, Insights, and Infrastructure
  • Proactively identify new AI tools ways that increase efficiency and clarity for product teams
  • Establish and maintain systems, leveraging AI where possible, to collect, analyze, and share product usage, customer feedback, and market insights
  • Partner with product managers to ensure decisions are grounded in data and aligned with key success metrics
  • Own the product tech stack (e.g., analytics, feedback, roadmap, instrumentation, & experimentation tools).
• Initiative Management
  • Lead and project-manage high-priority, cross-functional initiatives on behalf of the CPO
  • Track progress against company OKRs/KPIs and hold teams accountable to commitments
  • Step into ambiguous or understaffed strategic work where the CPO's involvement is needed but time doesn't allow
• Communications & Culture
  • Draft internal communications from the CPO including announcements, memos, and town hall content
  • Identify ways of maintaining a “work hard, but also have fun” culture
  • Help nurture the team through periods of change

Knowledge and Skills:

• Highly intelligent technology enthusiast and AI savant
• 5–10 years of professional experience, with a track record of increasing responsibility
• Prior experience in management consulting, operations, product management, or technology start-ops
• Superior operational and strategic chops
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; ability to write crisply and persuasively on behalf of a senior leader
• Strong analytical ability — comfortable with financial models, data analysis, and building business cases
• High EQ and interpersonal skills; able to build trust and influence without formal authority
• Outstanding organizational skills and ability to manage multiple high-stakes priorities simultaneously
• Absolute discretion and integrity when handling sensitive information

Preferred:

• Experience in a previous Chief of Staff or strategic operations role
• Familiarity with the company's industry or market
• MBA or equivalent graduate degree