FTEN Senior Product Manager

About the role

You set the product vision and ensure its execution. From shaping a multiyear roadmap to refining sprint-level stories, you translate mission needs, tech realities, and financial constraints into a coherent strategy—and drive cross-functional squads to deliver capability that matters. Your canvas spans market sensing, portfolio stewardship, agile backlog management, and go-to-market orchestration. You are both strategist and executor, toggling seamlessly between executive conversations and daily dev standups.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain a 3-year product vision aligned to mission impact and revenue goals.
• Maintain a rolling 12-month roadmap with quarterly KPI/KPPs; ensure PI objectives trace back to strategy.
• Track DoW capability gaps, SBIR trends, and competitor moves; translate insights into differentiated features and value propositions.
• Engage directly with warfighters, acquisition offices, and partners to validate priorities.
• Exposure to design thinking methods such as problem framing, ideation, prototyping, and iteration.
• Translate user needs, feedback, or pain points into practical solutions or improvements.
• Communicate ideas clearly, ask thoughtful questions, and share updates in a timely manner.
• Adapt communication style for different audiences, such as peers, managers, customers, or cross-functional partners.
• Present ideas, document decisions, and summarize complex information.
• Own and continuously groom the Team Backlog; balance new capability, tech debt, and compliance.
• Author crisp Initiatives/Epics/User stories with clear acceptance criteria; approve/reject based on Definition of Done.
• Lead iteration planning, daily syncs, demos, and acceptance to ensure alignment with PI objectives.
• Run quarterly Product Syncs with executives, engineers, and finance leads.
• Serve as first-line liaison with Systems Engineering, Cybersecurity, QA, and Ops to resolve impediments.
• Align capture plans, pricing strategies, and demo assets with Growth & Capture (G&C).
• Empower teams to pitch coherent, compelling product stories that withstand source-selection scrutiny.
• Track and act on metrics: velocity, lead time, defect escape rate, and portfolio ROI.
• Drive Inspect & Adapt actions across teams and trains.
• Own and continuously groom the Team Backlog; balance new capability, tech debt, and compliance.
• Author crisp Initiatives/Epics/User stories with clear acceptance criteria; approve/reject based on Definition of Done.
• Lead iteration planning, daily syncs, demos, and acceptance to ensure alignment with PI objectives.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Run quarterly Product Syncs with executives, engineers, and finance leads.
• Serve as first-line liaison with Systems Engineering, Cybersecurity, QA, and Ops to resolve impediments.
• Go-to-Market Enablement: Align capture plans, pricing strategies, and demo assets with Growth & Capture (G&C).
• Empower teams to pitch coherent, compelling product stories that withstand source-selection scrutiny.
• Continuous Improvement: Track and act on metrics: velocity, lead time, defect escape rate, and portfolio ROI.
• Drive Inspect & Adapt actions across teams and trains.

Requirements

• Education: B.S. or higher in an engineering field (Computer Science, Software Engineering, Math, Physics, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline).
• Experience: 12+ years of progressive experience in technical leadership, program management, or technical product management.
• Mission-Driven Mindset - Passion for supporting national security missions and advancing warfighter capabilities through user-focused software design.
• Systems Thinking - Ability to translate complex operational requirements into scalable, maintainable software architectures.
• Agile Execution - Strong experience managing Agile development cycles, backlogs, and sprint planning within multi-disciplinary teams.
• People Development - Demonstrated success managing engineers and fostering career growth while driving accountability and performance.
• Cross-Functional Communication - Comfortable collaborating across engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to align vision and execution.
• Experience working with defense, aerospace, tactical communications, networking, C5ISR, edge compute, mission systems, or other mission-critical technology.
• Demonstrated ability to translate customer and operator needs into product requirements, roadmaps, and execution priorities.
• Citizenship: US Citizen.
• Nice to have: Active US Secret or Top Secret clearance.
• Strong technical fluency with IP networking, software systems, RF communications, tactical data links, distributed systems, or network management concepts.
• Experience with tactical radios, MANETs, SATCOM, datalinks, software-defined networking, network orchestration, edge compute, or disconnected/degraded/intermittent/limited-bandwidth environments.
• Experience with AI/ML-enabled network optimization, autonomous network management, or decision-support tools.
• Experience with productizing capabilities that began as customer-specific engineering or R&D programs.
• 5+ years in a dedicated technical leadership or architectural role focused on software.
• Must be a nimble self-starter who is excited about technology and has the ability to think out of the box and suggest powerful new ideas.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Employee coverage is fully funded; a portion of dependents' coverage is funded as well.
• 11 paid Federal Holidays.
• Paid Time Off (PTO).
• Date of hire through second year: 10 days/year (accrued).
• After two years: unlimited 40 hours of paid sick leave per year.
• 401k with employer matching.
• Annual bonuses.
• Cell phone reimbursement: $100/month.