Principal, Technical Product Manager

Starbucks - Seattle, WA

Full-time - Principal

Seattle, WA

Food Services and Drinking Places

About the position

The Principal, Technical Product Manager at Starbucks is responsible for the strategic value, usability, and performance of the company's technology platforms, particularly for Contact Centers. This role involves leading the development of a modern global technology platform that enhances the experiences of customers, partners, and suppliers. The position requires a blend of technical expertise and product management skills to manage complex initiatives and drive cross-functional collaboration, ensuring that product features align with business goals and customer needs.

Responsibilities

• Builds the roadmap for a portfolio of products and services, informed by technology trends and business strategy.
• Directs the creation of feature requirements with functional and non-functional focus, in alignment with optimal customer experience and long-term business strategy.
• Drives solution and requirement decisions by providing technical consultation and direction to stakeholders.
• Leads alignment with peer technology teams on cross-functional solutions.
• Serves as a champion of the customer experience context to the engineering organization.
• Oversees creation of acceptance criteria/requirements to align with customer, business, and technical strategy goals.
• Accountable for the performance of the portfolio of products and services against business and technical (non-functional) requirements.
• Ensures functional alignment of portfolio of products and services to transitional and target enterprise architecture.
• Oversees prioritization of backlogs across the portfolio of products or services.
• Recommends new technology trends and innovative products/features to leadership.
• Directs application of data analysis to justify product decisions and apply key learnings.
• Leads definition of product health and performance metrics and dashboard/reporting requirements, and KPIs to measure performance against feature goals.
• Presents data-driven recommendations to improve feature performance and overall product health.
• Drives ongoing improvements to product performance.
• Lends deep and broad expertise in the product domain to engineering teams to influence technical features and solution architecture.
• Owns effective relationships with product and engineering leaders across Starbucks Technology.
• Interacts directly with business stakeholders to understand business issues and to present new ideas and solution recommendations.
• Drives elimination of ambiguity in feature criteria and goals.
• Presents solution options/recommendations clearly and persuasively to support business stakeholder decisions.
• Influences & negotiates with teams across Starbucks Technology, with business partners, and with third-party vendors and resolves most issues independently.
• Leads team members and peers in learning technical skills and business acumen.
• Presents and leads alignment of tradeoffs with decision-makers.
• Leads and influences mitigations across neighbor ST teams.
• Responsible for feature validation against goals and elimination of blocking issues.
• Works with cross-functional engineering teams on feature sizing and influences delivery planning.
• Practices iterative, agile development.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in a related field.
• Demonstrated ability to use analytics and optimization tools to inform product planning and prioritization (5+ years).
• Demonstrated ability to work with design and engineering to deliver customer facing features (5+ years).
• Hands on experience in developing roadmaps, priorities, features, story outlines, writing user stories, and coordinating/prioritizing conflicting requirements in a fast-paced, changing environment with variety of stakeholders (7 years).
• Managing product delivery and release in an agile environment (3 years).
• Industry experience in a technology environment with a record of successfully delivering complex products (10+ years).

Nice-to-haves

• Relevant functional/business process experience - 10 years.
• Product definition, measurement, and analysis experience - 10 years.
• Enterprise services product management or ownership experience - 7 years.
• ServiceNow - 5 years.
• Prior experience leading the design, execution, and continuous improvement of enterprise-wide, complex products and/or services.
• Deep subject matter expertise in Contact Centers and/or IT Service Management.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and gain the support of key stakeholders.
• Deep experience developing clear, thorough user stories and acceptance criteria that drive effective solution development anchored in customer experience.
• Application of business and technical metrics to define and measure product performance.
• Deep understanding of the system architecture and design concepts behind complex, enterprise-class software solutions at high transaction volumes.
• Experience designing future-proof solutions for business growth, scalability, resilience, and low operating cost.
• Skilled in the utilization of system development methodologies throughout the full project lifecycle.
• Ability to build consensus across a diverse group of stakeholders.
• Consistent use of strong verbal and written communication skills to influence outcomes.
• Ability to balance multiple priorities and meet deadlines.
• Strong knowledge of agile/scrum methodology and user centric design; may be certified product owner; may collaborate with PMO/scrum master on project methodology to highlight issues and help as needed for product lifecycle.

Benefits

• Health insurance coverage
• Dental insurance coverage
• 401k benefit for retirement savings plan
• Paid holidays
• Flexible scheduling
• Professional development opportunities
• Employee discount programs