Product Operations Manager Jobs in Wheaton, IL (NOW HIRING)

POSITION SUMMARY

This position is responsible for building and running the operating systems that help Follett Software's product organization scale across a multi-product portfolio. The Sr. Product Operations Manager partners across Product, Design, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Support, and leadership to create clear operating cadence, trusted insights, and repeatable launch and prioritization practices that help teams move faster with better alignment.

This role serves as a horizontal force multiplier across the full suite and sits within the Platform & Design line. The Sr. Product Operations Manager owns the rhythms, frameworks, product management tooling, and evidence infrastructure that help product leaders make better decisions, reduce operational drag on Product Managers, and maintain a consistent view of roadmap progress, customer signals, competitive movement, and product performance.

Success in this role requires strong judgment, systems thinking, analytical rigor, and exceptional cross-functional collaboration. This role also contributes to modern AI-enabled product work by helping the organization use AI tools responsibly for research, synthesis, reporting, and workflow automation while maintaining strong human accountability.

POSITION SCOPE

• Own the product operating cadence across the portfolio, including planning rhythms, roadmap reviews, launch readiness, business reviews, and status communication that keep teams aligned without slowing them down.
• Build and maintain prioritization, intake, and decision frameworks that help product leaders evaluate tradeoffs clearly and consistently across suites, strategic initiatives, and shared platform dependencies.
• Own and improve the product management tooling strategy across the portfolio, including the systems, workflows, documentation, and data hygiene that make planning, prioritization, reporting, and cross-functional coordination trustworthy, scalable, and useful to product leadership and the CPTO.
• Partner with Product Managers, Product Designers, Engineers, and Program Managers to reduce operational friction, improve clarity of ownership, and create repeatable ways of working from discovery through launch and post-launch review.
• Own product launch readiness practices, including cross-functional coordination with Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Support, and Enablement so launches are well-scoped, well-communicated, and operationally ready.
• Build and maintain a living view of the competitive landscape, including established competitors, adjacent entrants, and AI-native challengers, and convert that signal into battlecards, win/loss themes, and actionable recommendations.
• Run structured win/loss and churn synthesis in partnership with go-to-market teams and translate recurring patterns into product, pricing, packaging, positioning, and roadmap inputs.
• Turn product usage data, customer feedback, support trends, market research, and field input into decision-ready insight on adoption, engagement, retention risk, and feature impact.
• Partner with teams working across Pendo, Gong, Salesforce, NPS, CRM, and related systems to define the right metrics, improve signal quality, and create self-serve dashboards and health views for product leadership.
• Stand up and evolve automated product-health monitoring that helps the organization identify emerging issues, adoption gaps, and opportunities earlier.
• Create and maintain the templates, repositories, playbooks, workflow standards, and tooling conventions that allow the product organization to scale without each team rebuilding its own operating model.
• Support AI-enabled product and operational workflows by defining where automation helps, where human review is required, and what good evidence looks like before AI-generated analysis informs decisions.
• Other duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Business, Product Management, Operations, Engineering, Analytics, or a related field.
• 5–7 years of relevant experience across product operations, product management, program management, strategy, business operations, product analytics, or a similar cross-functional role in a SaaS or software environment.
• Demonstrated experience building operational systems, cadences, or decision frameworks that scaled product organizations rather than supporting only one-off initiatives.
• Strong understanding of modern product operating models, including portfolio planning, launch readiness, product development workflows, feedback loops, and metric design.
• Demonstrated ability to synthesize data from multiple sources and translate it into clear recommendations for product and executive leaders.
• Experience working closely with Product, Design, Engineering, revenue teams, and customer-facing functions to drive alignment without formal authority.
• Experience with product analytics, customer feedback, and collaboration tools such as Pendo, Gong, Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, product roadmap tools, spreadsheets, or similar systems.
• Strong written communication and executive presentation skills, including the ability to create decision-ready briefs, scorecards, dashboards, and operating updates that circulate broadly with minimal revision.
• High level of comfort with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the judgment to balance standardization with pragmatism.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI tools responsibly to accelerate and refine product operations work, including research, synthesis, reporting, workflow automation, documentation, and operating-model improvement, with clear understanding of where human review and evidence validation are required.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience in B2B SaaS serving complex institutional buyers such as school districts, government, healthcare, or other multi-stakeholder environments.
• Experience supporting a multi-product portfolio with shared platform dependencies, cross-suite reporting, and executive-level prioritization.
• Experience with competitive intelligence programs, win/loss analysis, product pricing inputs, or market insight functions.
• Experience in a private equity-backed, high-change, or scaling software environment.

WORK ENVIRONMENT

• This role is remote and only open to candidates currently located in the United States and able to work without sponsorship. 
• It requires a suitable space that provides a private and quiet workplace. 
• Work hours and schedules are set to accommodate the requirements of the position and the needs of the organization and may be adjusted as needed. 

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Perform tasks in a home office environment with frequent virtual meetings, communications, and interruptions, requiring effective time management and prioritization.
• Prolonged sitting with sustained visual focus on digital screens, requiring the ability to interact at a typical working distance.
• Frequent use of keyboard and mouse, involving repetitive hand movements and fine motor skills for typing, navigating, and handling materials.
• Occasionally adjust position or move within the workspace to reach, retrieve, or access items, involving bending, twisting, or reaching, and occasionally lifting or carrying items weighing up to 10 pounds.
• Travel requirements: Minimal (less than 10%)

This job description is intended to convey information essential to understanding the scope of the job and the general nature and level of work performed by job holders within this job. However, this job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of qualifications, skills, efforts, duties, responsibilities or working conditions associated with the position. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job.

At Follett Software, our people come first.
We're deeply committed to supporting the well-being, growth, and success of every Team Member. That commitment shows up in a thoughtfully designed, comprehensive benefits package that helps you thrive—at work and in life. Here's what you can expect:

• Fully remote work, giving you the flexibility to do your best work from anywhere in the continental U.S. (unless otherwise noted)
• Subsidized healthcare plans, including orthodontic coverage, with HSA option that includes employer matching
• Company-paid disability and life insurance, with the option to enhance coverage through voluntary plans
• Robust Paid Time Off, including Flex PTO for salaried roles, paid parental leave, company holidays, and paid volunteer service time
• Retirement savings with employer match, vesting every pay period
• Flexible Spending Accounts for healthcare and dependent care
• Optional supplemental coverages, such as accident, hospital, and critical illness insurance, identity theft and credit monitoring, and legal protection services
• Meaningful recognition and tangible rewards that celebrate achievements, fuel motivation, and recognize both individual and team success