Sr. Director of Product

AI is reshaping how software gets built, tested, and shipped. It has never been easier to create products quickly—or more important to understand whether those products actually work for the people who use them. This is where Applause sits. Applause helps some of the world’s leading organizations understand how their products perform in the real world. Our advantage comes from combining intelligent automation with a global community of testers, providing coverage across an unmatched range of locations, devices, abilities, languages, skills, and expertise. We know when to automate, when real people are essential, and how to combine the two to deliver faster testing and comprehensive coverage—so our customers can be confident in what they ship. We are looking for a **Sr. Director of Product** to own the product management practice at Applause and turn company vision into clear priorities, focused roadmaps, and products that create measurable customer and business value. This is a hands-on, player-coach role. You will lead and develop a team of Product Managers while also serving as the Product Manager for our QA Automation Platform team, one of the company’s most important areas of investment. Working closely with the CEO, CTO, Engineering leadership, and our commercial teams, you will connect company strategy with market intelligence, customer needs, and product performance. You will strengthen how we discover, build, launch, measure, and improve our products—and ensure we drive adoption and learn from what we ship. **What you’ll do:** - Translate company vision and strategy into clear investment decisions and roadmaps. - Own and strengthen the product management practice across Applause, establishing clear expectations and effective approaches to discovery, prioritization, planning, launch, and measurement for a small team of Product Managers. - Serve as the Product Manager for our QA Automation Platform team, owning discovery, roadmap, priorities, launch, adoption, measurement, and iteration. - Build a strong understanding of our customers, opportunity, and competition to identify opportunities, anticipate risks, and inform company and product decisions. - Partner with the CTO, Sales, Marketing, Delivery, and other customer-facing teams on pricing and packaging, positioning, launches, enablement, and adoption. - Establish meaningful product metrics and feedback loops to measure adoption, customer value, and business impact and guide future decisions. - Partner closely with Engineering leadership to sequence investments, manage tradeoffs, and guide execution. **What we’re looking for:** - We are looking for a product leader who can develop our product team, and turn an ambitious vision into focused, measurable execution. - You bring 8+ years of product management experience, including at least 3 years leading Product Managers and demonstrated experience building or strengthening a product management practice. - You have led Product Managers in collaborative, cross-functional environments. You know how to coach others, create clarity from ambiguity, and help teams move from broad direction to concrete product decisions and shipped work. - You are comfortable operating as both a product leader and a hands-on Product Manager. You can strengthen practices across the organization while still going deep enough to lead discovery and drive a critical product area from idea through adoption and iteration. - You are customer-centered, technically curious, commercially aware, and pragmatic. You understand how customer needs, market dynamics, competitive positioning, pricing, and go-to-market decisions connect to what gets built. - You know when more evidence will improve a decision and when it is time to make a thoughtful bet. You understand that shipping is only part of the job and know how to use adoption, customer feedback, and product performance to guide iteration and future investment. - You are fluent in the AI landscape and ener…