Senior Technical Product Leader - Platform Strategy

Signal and Strand; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Signal and Strand is seeking a Director of Product Management to own the multi-year platform strategy across publishing, membership, ticketing, and ad tech. You will write specs, lead vendor negotiations, and partner with engineering to ship against an aggressive roadmap.

The role reports to executive leadership and requires hands-on leadership, strong communication, and a track record of data-driven product decisions across multiple brands and markets. Seattle onsite.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of technical product management experience.
• Experience with CMS, subscription/membership platforms, CRM, or advertising technology (WordPress/Newspack, Piano, HubSpot, Broadstreet, or comparable platforms).
• Experience managing technical vendor and platform relationships, including contract negotiation and build-vs-buy decisions.
• Strong written communication skills, able to produce clear specs, business cases, and roadmaps for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience partnering directly with engineering teams to scope, prioritize, and ship technical products.
• Track record of using data and metrics to drive product decisions and outcomes.
• Comfort operating with autonomy in a lean, fast-moving organization, and hands-on with details as well as strategy.
• Preferred: media, publishing, membership/loyalty programs, or ticketing/events tech.
• Preferred: hands-on development across multiple markets or multi-tenant architectures.
• Preferred: familiarity with fraud prevention, payments, or redemption systems.
• Preferred: people management experience or building a team.
• Preferred: experience as first technical product hire and establishing process from scratch.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the multi-year technical product vision and roadmap across publishing, membership, ticketing, and advertising technology; translate into a prioritized execution plan.
• Lead strategy, selection, and optimization of core platform stack (CMS/publishing, subscription/membership, CRM/marketing automation, ad tech, app publishing) across markets.
• Own reader and member identity architecture for a unified view and personalization use cases.
• Scale membership programs with fraud mitigation, real-time redemption tracking, and instant issuance of partner perks.
• Evaluate, negotiate, and manage ticketing platform relationships while retaining ownership of data.
• Write clear specs, business cases, and roadmaps aligning technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Own vendor relationships: contract negotiations, performance management, and build-vs-buy decisions.
• Collaborate with editorial, advertising, membership, and events teams to surface priorities.
• Establish metrics that connect technical decisions to reader growth, retention, and ad yield; drive prioritization.
• Create processes that let a small team make strong technical product decisions.
• Provide immediate technical product direction to engineering from day one.
• Build business case for growing the technical product function and hiring as needed.

Skills

Technical product mgmt

CMS

Subscription platforms

CRM

Advertising tech

Vendor management

Written communication

Engineering collaboration

Data-driven decisions

Autonomy in lean org

Multi-market product

Fraud prevention/payments

Team building

Tools

WordPress/Newspack

Piano

HubSpot

Broadstreet

Pugpig

Job description

Signal and Strand is seeking a Director of Product Management to own the multi-year platform strategy across publishing, membership, ticketing, and ad tech. You will write specs, lead vendor negotiations, and partner with engineering to ship against an aggressive roadmap.

The role reports to executive leadership and requires hands-on leadership, strong communication, and a track record of data-driven product decisions across multiple brands and markets. Seattle onsite.