Director of Product Operations

Apollo.io is the leading go-to-market solution for revenue teams, trusted by over 500,000 companies and millions of users globally, from rapidly growing startups to some of the world's largest enterprises. Apollo.io provides sales and marketing teams with easy access to verified contact data for over 270 million B2B contacts, along with tools to engage and convert these contacts in one unified platform. By helping revenue professionals find the most accurate contact information and automating the outreach process, Apollo.io turns prospects into customers. Apollo raised a series D in 2023 and is backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and more, and counts the former President and COO of Hubspot, JD Sherman, among its board members. Apollo.io is growing rapidly, with 900% revenue growth since 2021, and is looking for world-class talent to keep building with us.

About the Role

As the Director of Product Operations, you will play a critical role in shaping and overseeing the operational aspects of our product development lifecycle and ensuring the R&D teams are enabled the build the best possible products for our customers. Your main focus will be on the cross-divisional ownership of the product journey, including roadmap planning, release processes, and driving the operational rhythm of every R&D function (Product, Engineering, Design, and Research). You will work closely with Go-To-Market (GTM) Operations and Product Management teams to ensure that our product operations are streamlined, effective, and aligned with our business goals.

What You'll do

Systems, Processes and Planning

• Drive the quarterly OKR and project planning operating cadence and processes to ensure all R&D departments, teams and individuals have clear goals and North Star Metric targets across any given planning quarter.
• Document and work with all R&D teams on the adoption of agile best practices and invest in continuous enablement and onboarding for agile best practices.
• Partner with Engineering and Product teams to set and enforce bug definition / triage processes + track bug resolution
• Set and enforce experimentation / product release best practices
• Build and maintain the core tools the R&D teams use to power project management, planning activities, and more

Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) and Roadmap Alignment

• Maintain, iterate upon, and continue to enable all R&D teams (and all R&D adjacent teams like Product Marketing and Business Intelligence) on the Product Development Lifecycle.
• Create a unified roadmap for everything due to ship over the next 6-12 weeks and ensure all important release info is available both within R&D and across the company
• Ensure all large product releases have a thorough release plan with success criteria and checkpoints and are communicated internally to all relevant GTM teams

Data / Analytics for Core Product Releases / Experiments (in partnership with BI / Finance)

• Refresh and maintain reporting for North Star Metrics for all R&D teams and priority workstreams.
• Ensure that all R&D experiments maintain reporting and readouts at the end of an experimentation period
• Periodic deep-dives into P0/P1 KPI performance or specific experiments
• Drive reporting and retrospectives across all Engineering squads to give insight into key productivity / efficiency metrics

Run R&D Dept-Level Rituals and Operating Cadence

• Plan and drive all R&D leadership, cross-functional, and All-Hands meetings
• Drive all R&D product and design review meetings

About You

• You have a minimum of 10 total years of relevant experience (technology marketing, sales, or consulting) and 5+ years of direct product and / or product operations experience with a track record of advancement and team leadership
• Highly analytical: Strong analytical skills, including fluency with Microsoft Excel and BI tools like Looker, Tableau, and/or Amplitude. Knowledge of SQL is strongly preferred but not required.
• Intellectual Rigor: Strong first principles thinker and someone who is able to drive efficient and rigorous analysis, research and insight generation, and building hypotheses and an action plan.
• Able to build great systems, processes and ways of working: Ability to solve complex business problems, think from first principles, and build scalable processes.
• Excellent communicator: Excellent communication skills to distill complex thoughts and strategies into simple, actionable recommendations.
• Highly collaborative and strong team player with high EQ: Ability to build trust quickly, high degree of empathy and expertise at managing senior, cross-functional relationships. Experience working closely with functional leaders to solve challenging business problems; credibly present and debate recommendations with senior leadership.
• Bias towards action and Ownership mentality: Someone who exhibits a strong results-oriented ownership mentality and owns both successes and failures / learnings in past experiences. Strong bias towards action and experimentation and ability to exhibit good judgment in ambiguous situations with imperfect data. We want someone in this role who is a "learn it all" as opposed to a "know it all".
• Strong product intuition and understanding of a variety of SaaS product verticals and markets (doesn't have to be specifically SalesTech or MarTech)

What You'll Love About Apollo

Besides the great compensation package and culture that thrives in openness and excellence, we invest tremendous effort into developing our remote employees' careers. The team embraces that we have a sole purpose: to help customers maximize their full revenue potential on the Apollo platform. This mindset opens us up to a lot of creative approaches to making customers successful at scale. You'll be a significant part of a lean, remote team, empowered to really own your role as a proactive educator. We're very collaborative at Apollo, so you'll be able to lean on your teammates, even in adjacent departments, to help you achieve lofty goals. You'll be supported and encouraged to experiment and take educated risks that lead to big wins. And, you'll have a whole team remotely by your side to help you do it!