Director of Product Management Konnect SaaS Platform

Are you ready to power the World's connections?

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box - we're looking for candidates that are particularly strong in a few areas, and have some interest and capabilities in others.

Why will you enjoy this new opportunity?

The Kong Konnect team is seeking a Director of Product Management to recruit & lead a team of product managers to define product strategy and advance our mission to make connecting APIs and microservices across today's hybrid, multi-cloud environments easier and faster than ever. The Konnect team is focused on helping customers easily operate API gateways and service meshes with a cohesive full lifecycle API management experience spanning developers, architects, and operators.

Your team is responsible for the core SaaS Platform that powers Konnect and enables the delivery of SaaS Application experiences and Runtime Management of Gateway & Service Mesh data planes. You will play a pivotal role leading the team to define compelling and competitively differentiated capabilities, communicate our roadmap to internal and external stakeholders, understand our customers deeply, and collaborate with marketing and sales to bring Kong Konnect to market. This team offers a creative environment where you will have the opportunity to build new businesses from the ground up while developing skills in cutting-edge technologies.

• Why should you want to work at Kong?
• Market Opportunity - We are on a quest to build a $10b+ software company over the next few years and need YOUR help!
• APIs are driving innovation across every industry!
• Strong VC team, Series D, strong year over year revenue growth!
• Technical Leadership - We are recognized as the leader in innovation in the connectivity space.
• Marco, our CTO/co-founder - "We are the Cisco of L4 and L7" - CUBE Conversation, March 2021
• We are the leading innovator in the connectivity space!
• Amazing Team & Culture - Come be a "Konger" and find out what we mean.
• Great Place to Work Certified in 2020 & 2021
• Kong employees discuss our culture at our 2020 Company Kickoff
• Building Great Products - Learn why the world's largest companies love our tech!
• Kong Named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant
• Over 250m+ downloads of our open source API gateway! Over 40k+ stars on Github between Kong API and Kong Insomnia!

What You'll Be Doing

• Driving the overall Konnect core platform roadmap, including defining the priorities and tracking the success of core capabilities (identity, billing, APIs, user experience, application feature delivery, runtime management, etc).
• Building a highly functional and self-sufficient team of product managers.
• Defining product focus areas based on an intimate knowledge of the specific target customers and product ecosystem.
• Lead in a cross-functional and collaborative role spanning multiple teams such as product, design, data & product analysts, engineering, and customer success.
• Partner closely with product marketing and field teams on enablement, messaging, and go-to-market approaches.
• Collaborating with other product owners, design, and engineering to bring your ideas to market through rapid iteration.
• Be a technical, strong and eloquent product advocate for our full-lifecycle API management platform with regular presentations and talks.
• Represent Kong and our product solutions to customer executives and key stakeholders.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of software product management experience, preferably in SaaS enterprise platforms.
• A quantitative product management mindset and ability to use data to inform product decisions.
• Experience working with API products and developers as a primary product audience.
• Understanding of how B2B go-to-market motions work
• Excellent communication skills: both written and verbal.
• Flexibility to a changing set of opportunities and fluency in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience hiring & coaching product managers and leading highly-functioning product management teams.
• What is leadership like for this role? What is the structure and culture of the team like?

The hiring manager for this role is Ross Kukulinski, Senior Director of Product Management. Ross is a recognized technical product leader in the API, Kubernetes, and Cloud Native space having recently joined Kong from VMware where he drove the Heptio & VMware Tanzu product strategies for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Mission Control. Now at Kong, Ross is responsible for leading the Konnect & Service Mesh product teams including aiding Kong in the the shift from enterprise packaged software to SaaS-delivered customer experiences. The Konnect team is made up of individuals with diverse backgrounds who are excited about delivering a new SaaS offering to enable Kong's customers to operate, scale, and manage APIs in today's modern application world.

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

What is a Konger?

We are a group of makers, thinkers, and doers focused on helping today's developers build tomorrow's technology. Our teams work on the bleeding edge of API innovation to provide our users with a central nervous system for data and services.

We put design at the heart of everything we do, and we're relentlessly focused on creating beautiful experiences for our customers. That's why technology companies, major banks, e-commerce innovators, and government agencies put Kong in front of their most important web applications.

We believe in the power of Open Source and everything it stands for. That's why developers around the world enthusiastically contribute on top of our open-source platform.

We are passionate about solving challenges that will fundamentally shape the future of technology, and we're looking for the right people to join us on our mission. If you believe in taking ownership of your work, making an impact, and having fun along the way, we would love to talk to you.

Kong Core Values:

• Be Inclusive. We work together from anywhere to achieve our common goals. Our differences make us stronger.
• Be Authentic. We are genuine, principled and confident without arrogance. Show respect and kindness, especially in tough moments.
• Be Relentlessly Resourceful. We work with purpose, obsession and grit. It takes muscle to do hard things and doing hard things build muscle.
• Be Customer Obsessed. We care. Customers are everything, we put them at the center of everything you do. We are all empowered to make an impact.
• Be Curious. We value ideas over hierarchy. Never accept the status quo. We make bold bets, fail, and learn everyday. There is always a way.
• Be an Owner. We are drivers not passengers and own the quality and outcomes of our work.

About Kong:

Kong creates software and managed services that connect APIs and microservices natively across and within clouds, Kubernetes, data centers and more using intelligent automation. Built on an open source core, Kong's service connectivity platform enables digital innovation by allowing organizations to reliably and securely manage the full lifecycle of APIs and services for modern architectures, including microservices, serverless and service mesh. By providing developer teams with unprecedented architectural freedom, Kong accelerates innovation cycles, increases productivity, and seamlessly bridges legacy and modern systems and applications. For more information about Kong, please visit konghq.com or follow @thekonginc on Twitter.