Director, Product Management Excellence

The Director, Product Management Excellence is a senior products planning, operations and transformation leader responsible for defining, standardizing, and scaling unified best in class product management lifecycle (PMLC) processes across the Digital Thread portfolio. In an environment where product teams operate with fragmented processes, inconsistent artifacts, and limited enabling tooling, this role provides the connective tissue that allows PTC to move faster, operate with greater focus, and compete more effectively in an increasingly dynamic marketplace.

Collaborating with segment and horizontal product management leaders, R&D, and GTM teams, this role drives a unified, data-driven product management operating model that enhances execution across the entire product management lifecycle. Operating within a lean hierarchy, the Director influences broadly and executes through others.

Key responsibilities include designing and implementing a comprehensive PMLC framework, scaling modern product management tools (including AI-enabled workflows), and ensuring lasting adoption through enablement and governance. The role reports to the VP Digital Thread Products Planning and co-leads the Product Management Guild in partnership with him.

Your Impact

• Create order from fragmentation by establishing a unified product management operating model that improves speed, alignment, and decision-making across segments.

• Raise product management maturity by defining clear standards, best practices, and playbooks that enable consistent, high-quality execution at scale.

• Increase organizational productivity and transparency through the effective use of modern PMLC tooling and AI-augmented workflows.

• Translate strategy into execution by ensuring lifecycle processes, tooling, and behaviors reinforce each other and deliver visible business outcomes.

Your Team

This role serves as a horizontal leader within the Products organization, working through the Product Management Guild, Product Planning & Operations, and cross-functional teams instead of a traditional hierarchy. Initially, the Director may have one direct report and will work closely with senior leaders in PLM, ALM, CAD, SLM, and the extended Enterprise. The role has regular visibility with senior leadership and plays a key part in shaping how product management is understood, practiced, and measured across PTC.

Day to Day Responsibilities

• Evolve and steward an end-to-end Product Management Lifecycle (PMLC) framework covering insights, strategy, planning, prioritization, requirements, roadmaps, delivery, launch, and retirement.

• Build and maintain a comprehensive set of product management process playbooks in close partnership with the broader organization and team, including standards, templates, quality criteria, and decision frameworks.

• Drive the implementation, rollout, and scaling of an enterprise PMLC tool, ensuring it reinforces best practices, integrates with existing R&D tools and company systems (e.g., Jira, Salesforce, etc), and delivers measurable improvements in execution, transparency, and outcomes.

• Partner with the AI COE to embed AI-enabled workflows into product management activities (e.g., insight synthesis, prioritization, prototyping, requirements authoring, and executive communication) to increase speed and effectiveness.

• Lead adoption and change management efforts for PMLC processes, tooling, and AI workflows including enablement, training, communications, and continuous feedback loops.

• Co-lead the Product Management Guild the department head, shaping its agenda, facilitating cross-segment collaboration, and ensuring guild outputs translate into real, sustained changes in how teams operate.

Preferred Skills and Knowledge

• Deep expertise in product management best practices across the full product lifecycle, including discovery, strategy, road mapping, requirements, and portfolio planning.

• Strong experience designing and operationalizing scalable processes in complex, multiproduct, or multi-segmented organizations.

• Hands on familiarity with modern product management and agile tooling ecosystems like Productsboard, Aha!, and Jira, and how to operationalize them at enterprise scale.

• Proven ability to drive change through influence, facilitation, and governance rather than direct authority.

• Working knowledge of applying AI and automation to knowledge work processes to improve efficiency, quality, and decision making.

Preferred Experience

• 10+ years of experience in product management, product operations, or product transformation roles.

• Experience leading enterprise scale process, tooling, or operating model initiatives with clear adoption and business impact.

• Prior involvement in communities of practice, guilds, or horizontal operating models is strongly preferred.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree in business, engineering, or related field preferred.

• Demonstrated track record of influencing senior leaders and driving cross functional alignment in complex organizations.

Why PTC?

PTC unleashes innovation with market proven digital solutions that enable industrial companies to differentiate their products and services, improve operational excellence, and increase workforce productivity. At PTC, we don't just imagine a better world-we enable it. This role offers a rare opportunity to shape how product management operates at scale, to partner directly with senior leadership, and to leave a lasting imprint on one of PTC's most critical capabilities.