Job Summary
The Principal Product Manager is a senior leadership role responsible for defining and driving the long-term product vision and strategy for Cisive’s employment screening services, including verifications of employment and education, criminal and sex offender registry searches, credit history reporting, and other related services. This individual acts as a thought leader, influences across the organization, and is accountable for the success of critical product initiatives.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Define and evangelize the overarching product vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for a major product line or platform, ensuring alignment with corporate objectives.
- Identify and capitalize on disruptive market opportunities, technological advancements, and strategic partnerships to drive significant business growth.
- Translate customer needs and business requirements into detailed product specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
- Manage the product backlog, prioritizing features based on strategic importance, customer value, and technical feasibility.
- Define and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), proactively identifying trends and opportunities for product improvement.
- Collaborate with software development and design to ensure smooth product development.
- Participate in user acceptance testing (UAT) and provide feedback to development teams.
- Oversee the entire product lifecycle for highly complex and strategic initiatives, ensuring successful delivery and measurable business outcomes.
- Communicate product updates, progress, and challenges to stakeholders at all levels.
- Provide strategic leadership as a subject matter expert across multiple high-revenue product lines, driving cross-functional alignment and proactively anticipating the downstream impact of product decisions across the broader portfolio.
- Act as a key advisor to executive leadership on product strategy, market trends, and competitive landscape.
- Anticipate and mitigate significant product risks, making high-impact decisions that affect the entire product portfolio.
- Mentor and guide other Product Managers, fostering their growth and development.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; MBA or Master's degree highly preferred.
- 8+ years of extensive and progressive experience in product management, with a proven track record of defining and executing successful product strategies for major product lines or platforms.
- 3+ years of experience in employment screening services.
- Exceptional strategic thinking, business acumen, and the ability to translate complex ideas into actionable product plans.
- Superior communication, negotiation, and influencing skills, capable of engaging and inspiring diverse audiences from engineers to executives.
- Help define team processes in use of product management tools (e.g., Jira, Asana, Aha!).
- Deep expertise in market analysis, competitive intelligence, and customer segmentation.
- Deep understanding of user experience (UX) principles and design thinking.
- Proven ability to build, mentor, and lead high-performing product teams.
- Experience in a fast-paced, high-growth environment, ideally within a relevant industry.
- Strong understanding of financial models and business cases for product investment.
Working conditions
This job operates in a professional office environment or remotely. This role routinely uses general office equipment.
Physical requirements
- Ability to communicate clearly and exchange accurate information constantly.
- Constantly operates computer, keyboard, copy and fax machine, phone, and other general office equipment.
- Ability to occasionally move objects up to 10 lbs.
Direct reports
None.