The Senior Lead Product Manager develops, manages, and optimizes one or more large, complex, and high-revenue product lines across the full lifecycle, from problem discovery through delivery and in-market performance, in an AI-native environment. The role owns domain strategy and backlog quality from Epic to User Story and uses AI tools to accelerate discovery, specification, and delivery at scale.
Recognized as an expert within the company, the Sr Lead Product Manager brings depth and breadth of product management expertise along with fluency across adjacent disciplines needed to manage product lines of strategic importance. The role works alongside engineering, UX, finance, and client-facing teams across both AI-driven and traditional SDLC environments, and is accountable for identifying market opportunities, translating them into prioritized, well-defined work, and measuring outcomes against defined KPIs. It requires strong customer instincts, the ability to lead large cross-functional teams, and command of both strategic product practice and sprint-level execution.
Primary Duties / Key Responsibilities
Strategy and Discovery
- Develops, manages, and optimizes one or more large, complex, or strategically important revenue product lines, forming an in-depth understanding of problems by customer segment, persona, and competitive landscape.
- Partners with UX research, marketing research, client solutions, and business stakeholders to gather and synthesize feedback from consumers and clients.
- Identifies, quantifies, and clearly communicates customer and market opportunities.
- Uses AI-augmented discovery workflows to accelerate problem analysis, synthesize research inputs, and produce implementation-ready specifications.
Planning
- Creates and maintains product vision and roadmap, and builds business plans to secure funding, including go-to-market strategy and value propositions.
- Owns backlog quality across Epic, Feature, and User Story altitudes, ensuring artifacts meet exit criteria, reflect current delivery reality, and communicate the value increment at each slice.
- Prioritizes and sequences work against business outcomes using data, stakeholder input, and ROI analysis, exercising expert judgment over AI-generated trade-off recommendations to ensure alignment with strategic context.
- Collaborates with other product managers to ensure alignment across products and participates in planning and inspect-and-adapt events.
Development
- Leads feature creation and specification, identifies business rules and impact, and works with Product Owners and delivery teams to ensure cross-team alignment.
- Leads prototyping, testing, and validation with Product Management, Development, Solutions Delivery, and UX.
- Develops and recommends buy, build, or partner solutions to Agile Release Trains.
- Maintains artifact hygiene across Milestones, Epics, Features, and User Stories, using AI-augmented authoring tools to keep artifacts current at scale.
Launch and Readiness
- Partners with Product Readiness, client solutions, and marketing to define launch approach (Beta, Pilot, GA, phased) and to produce launch communications including release notes, training materials, and KPI tracking plans.
Sales and Client Engagement
- Engages with clients as a subject matter expert to understand performance needs for in-market products.
- Partners with key stakeholders to develop pricing strategies and ensure material contribution to ROI, and communicates product performance and value to business and development stakeholders.
In-Market Performance
- Establishes structured feedback mechanisms including usage data, support signals, and direct user input so the user's voice is consistently represented in prioritization.
- Synthesizes in-market performance signals to inform Product Life Cycle decisions such as investment, iteration, or sunset recommendations.
- Regularly communicates product and experience performance to stakeholders and the broader organization.
Functional Skills
- AI-Augmented Product Practice: Directs AI systems across the product lifecycle to accelerate and improve work. Fluent in spec-driven authoring, effective prompting, skill and tool usage, and critical evaluation of AI output. Knows when to trust AI output and when to verify or override. Sets the team's AI workflows and coaches others on adoption.
- Technology and Delivery Fluency: Partners with engineering on system architecture, technical trade-offs, and delivery approach. Maintains credibility in architectural discussions and leads informed buy, build, or partner decisions across complex, integrated systems.
- Business Outcome Translation: Expert ability to translate business outcomes and strategic objectives into clearly defined, actionable work, decomposing organizational goals into prioritized, well-scoped deliverables and building the funding cases that resource them.
- Cross-Functional Orchestration: Expert ability to operate across UX, engineering, readiness, analytics, and commercialization simultaneously, coordinating dependencies across large cross-functional teams and keeping work moving when priorities compete.
Foundational Skills
- Acts with Integrity: Acts in accordance with own values, standards, and beliefs even under pressure, and adheres to ethical and professional standards, regulations, and organizational policies.
- Builds Partnerships: Proactively builds and maintains business-focused, long-term working relationships inside and outside the organization, working across boundaries to achieve business, customer, and partner goals.
- Drives Innovation: Advanced in exploring alternative ways to view and solve problems, testing promising ideas and taking risks in the interest of finding a better way.
- Focuses on Execution: Advanced in establishing challenging goals designed to deliver exceptional business results and working tenaciously to overcome obstacles and meet or exceed them.
- Strives for Excellence: Advanced in establishing criteria and work procedures to achieve a high level of quality, productivity, and service, and accepting responsibility for outcomes.
Education, Experience and Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in a related field; Master's degree preferred.
- Minimum 8 years of Product Management experience.
- Working knowledge of SAFe Agile methodology and a wide breadth of knowledge across the industry or business.
- Extensive experience in the design, development, and implementation of product plans across full product lifecycle methodologies.
- Extensive experience creating, prioritizing, and recommending epics and features.
- Extensive experience conducting competitive research and analysis and identifying KPIs to measure product value.
- Extensive experience with executive presentations and with collaborative, cross-functional, complex team environments.
- Experience working in an AI-augmented product environment, or demonstrated proficiency applying AI tools to product work.
Drug Testing:
To be employed in this role, you'll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position. However, we are a drug-free workplace, so the possession, use or being under the influence of drugs illegal under federal or state law during work hours, on company property and/or in company vehicles is prohibited.
Compensation:
Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $134,900.00 - $224,900.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.
Benefits:
The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company’s needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.
EOE, including disability/vets
