Principal Product Operations Manager

Job description

Drata is building the trust layer between great companies - automating compliance, managing risk, and helping organizations prove trust continuously as they scale. We're Dratanauts: a global crew of 600+ professionals united by a culture that rewards integrity, ownership, and raising the bar, no matter where in the world we're working from. Why Join the Drata Team? At Drata, you're not maintaining legacy compliance software - you're building the agentic AI platform defining what trust looks like for the next generation of companies. Here's what makes the work itself worth showing up for: - Problems without a playbook: You'll work at the edge of AI and security, building agentic governance, continuous compliance, and real-time trust verification to solve problems that don't have an established answer yet. You're writing it as you go. - Real ownership, not just process: Our values center on owning outcomes and raising the bar, not checking boxes. You're expected to have opinions and back them. - A seat at the table: Your perspective is unique and valued. Open debate and diverse viewpoints are built into how decisions actually get made here, at every level. - Growth at rocketship speed: Drata is scaling fast, which means scope grows fast too. High performers get more ownership, visibility, and experience. - A crew, not just coworkers: Dratanauts consistently describe a "come as you are" culture with sharp, curious people—the kind of team that makes hard problems genuinely fun to solve. See what they say here https://drata.com/about/careers/life and follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/drata/posts/?feedView=all for company news, employee stories, and career updates. Job Summary: As Principal Product Operations, you will define and scale the operating model that enables Product, Design, and Engineering to execute with clarity, rigor, and speed. This is a highly strategic, cross-functional leadership role responsible for shaping how product investments are prioritized, planned, measured, and communicated across the company. You will partner closely with executive leaders across Product, Design, Engineering, Customer Success, Sales, and Operations to drive alignment on product strategy, annual and quarterly planning, roadmap governance, portfolio health, experimentation, and business outcomes. You will serve as a force multiplier for the product organization by establishing the systems, cadences, and insights that help teams make better decisions and deliver greater impact at scale. What you’ll do: - Own and evolve the product operating model, including planning frameworks, prioritization practices, governance mechanisms, decision-making cadences, and cross-functional collaboration norms. - Lead company-level product planning and roadmap operations, partnering with senior leaders to drive annual planning, quarterly planning, investment tradeoff discussions, commitment tracking, and executive communication. - Establish scalable mechanisms to improve visibility, accountability, and execution across the product development lifecycle, from idea intake through launch and post-launch measurement. - Drive portfolio-level insight and operational rigor by defining and tracking the health of strategic initiatives, product bets, delivery risks, and outcome attainment. - Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, GTM, and Customer teams to improve how customer feedback, market signals, and business priorities inform product decisions. - Build and operationalize executive-ready reporting on roadmap progress, product performance, organizational throughput, experimentation results, and key operational metrics. - Identify structural inefficiencies and lead high-impact initiatives to improve planning quality, process consistency, speed of execution, and cross-functional alignment. - Evaluate, implement, and optimize tooling, systems, and workflows that support product planning, collaboration, experimentation, analytics, and knowledge management. - Develop scalable frameworks for experimentation and learning, enabling teams to run effective tests, measure impact, and incorporate findings into product strategy. - Create and maintain durable documentation, standards, playbooks, and best practices for product and design operations. - Influence leaders at all levels through data-driven recommendations, strong operational judgment, and a clear point of view on how to improve organizational effectiveness. - Serve as a thought partner to product and functional leaders on organizational design, process maturity, and operational excellence. What you’ll bring: - 10+ years of experience in product operations, product management, strategy and operations, business operations, or a related discipline, with significant experience in high-growth SaaS and AI-first environments. - Demonstrated success operating at principal or director level or equivalent, influencing senior leaders and driving cross-functional change across complex organizations. - Deep expertise in product development lifecycles, product management practices, design collaboration models, and engineering partnership. - Strong experience leading portfolio planning, roadmap operations, prioritization processes, and executive-level business reviews. - Exceptional analytical and systems thinking skills, with the ability to translate data into strategic insights, operational recommendations, and clear decisions. - Strong command of product and business analytics ecosystems, including tools such as Segment, Amplitude, Productboard, Linear, Jira, BI platforms, and experimentation frameworks. - Experience designing scalable workflows and automations using tools such as Zapier, Retool, or similar platforms. - Excellent program leadership skills, including the ability to drive alignment across multiple stakeholders, manage ambiguity, and execute through influence rather than authority. - Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the abili