Senior Director, Product Management

Overview

Rightsline is building the AI-native platform for IP commerce. We are transforming how rights, royalties, and finance software works moving from a modern system of record into an agentic product model, migrating customers off legacy acquired products onto a unified platform, and rebuilding our operating rhythm around builders who can ship product end-to-end with AI as a native part of the craft.

We are hiring a Senior Director of Product Management to run a portfolio slice including Rights, Royalties, Finances and/or Platform as a business-unit leader. You will own the roadmap, commercial outcomes, and craft bar across these three pillars, and you will directly manage a bench of Lead PMs, Senior PMs, and Product Managers. You will be a champion of Rightsline's flat, builder-first PM operating model and of the AI-native product development lifecycle your team executes against. You will partner directly with the CPO on annual planning, portfolio strategy, and M&A; and you will be one of the leaders the ELT and board look to for confidence that product is compounding into commercial results.

What You’ll Own

Lead the Portfolio

• Own the portfolio's roadmap, operating model, and outcomes across the Rights, Royalties, Finances and/or Platform pillars. Set the multi-quarter direction, hold the quarterly plan, and make build-vs-buy-vs-partner calls across the portfolio independently.

• Time horizon: annual planning; one-to-two-year portfolio vision; multi-quarter execution rhythm across your Product Areas. 

• Sequence investment across your Product Areas. Rebalance headcount, priorities, and dependencies between Rights, Royalties, Finances and/or Platform as customer signal and commercial results dictate. Cross-Product-Area orchestration is the daily job, and the seams between Areas are yours to keep tight.

• Named on architectural calls at the portfolio level in partnership with Engineering leadership. 

• Represent Rightsline externally with strategic accounts, industry forums, QBRs.

Customer-Driven Work That Drives Commercial Outcomes

• Own portfolio-level adoption, revenue, and retention outcomes. Product bets across the portfolio are judged on how they move commercial numbers, not on shipped feature counts. This is the most important measure of the seat.

• Personally develop customer relationships beyond scheduled QBRs. Your habit of being close to real customers sets the standard for the team you manage; you carry a personal cadence of named-account discovery every quarter.

• Own the portfolio's customer feedback and win/loss loop with GTM leadership. Translate what customers and the market are actually telling us into product bets and away from noise.

• Drive category-defining bets across the portfolio. Sign off on portfolio-level launch claims for accuracy, compliance, security.

Team Leadership – Direct IC Management Across the Portfolio

• Directly manage a bench of Lead PMs, Senior PMs, and Product Managers (typically 4–6 direct reports) across the Rights, Royalties, Finances and/or Platform Product Areas. Sign off on all PM hires within the portfolio.

• Coach Lead PMs to be strategy owners and business-owners for their Product Areas, not delivery coordinators and coach Senior PMs and PMs on their own Product Area outcomes with the same rigor you carry the portfolio.

• Own the portfolio's talent story: hire, grow, hold accountable, and, when needed, move people out. Level the team up materially over your first four quarters, especially in the seams between Product Areas.

• Set the portfolio's craft bar: how discovery gets run, how launches are owned, how quality is measured. Every PM in the portfolio ships PRDs plus user stories plus working prototypes. Continuous learning and calibration cadences are your responsibility.

Champion the AI-Native Product Development Lifecycle

• Champion your team’s execution against the AI-native product development lifecycle. PMs who can ship discovery, PRDs, prototypes, and production-adjacent code with AI as a native part of the craft  are one of the biggest unlocks for our company. The rate at which your team adopts that model is your number to move.

• Model AI fluency personally. You are not asking your team to do work you have not done yourself; you have your own hands on modern AI development tooling.

Portfolio Strategy, Annual Planning & M&A

• Partner directly with the CPO on the annual planning cycle. You are one of the few voices at the table that shape where investment goes across the entire product organization.

• Own portfolio strategy across your Product Areas; sequencing, staffing shape, and prioritization inside your remit; and named contribution to trade-offs at the CPO and ELT level. 

• Own the portfolio's stake in platform investment and in customer migrations from acquired products onto our unified platform. These are load-bearing bets for the company; execution against them is a direct measure of the seat.

• Author partnership and M&A theses for the portfolio. Shepherd them through diligence with the CPO, Engineering, Finance, and other counterparties as needed.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Teams

• Own the portfolio's operating relationship with peer leaders in Engineering, Design, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and Finance. Run the working cadence, resolve cross-team dependencies, and hold the seams so the portfolio ships as one product organization, not several.

• Partner with Engineering leadership on architecture, staffing, and delivery predictability across Product Areas. Partner with Design leadership on craft standards for the surfaces your teams build. Partner with GTM leadership on positioning, packaging, launch readiness, and win/loss.

• Represent Product to the CS, Sales, Finance, and Engineering leadership teams on portfolio matters. Own the portfolio's operating narrative at QBRs and other company- and leadership-level forums.

• Present to the Executive Leadership Team and to the board as the portfolio's work warrants. Own the certification of product best practices, quality standards, adoption metrics, and continuous-learning cadences that show up in board materials.

• Trusted to stand in for the CPO in executive forums and ELT reviews when the portfolio's remit is central.

What You’ll Bring

• 10–15 years of diverse product management experience in B2B enterprise SaaS, with 3+ years directly managing PMs – specifically managing individual-contributor PMs (Lead PMs, Senior PMs, PMs), not exclusively managing managers. This seat manages ICs. Senior Director candidates should have run one to two full annual planning cycles at the ELT and board level.

• A track record of owning a portfolio slice, product line, or business unit end-to-end and moving its commercial outcomes including adoption, revenue, retention – not just shipping features.

• Real experience leveling up a PM team materially: hiring the bar up, coaching operators into managers, and holding people accountable to a builder standard rather than a coordinator standard.

• A clear point of view on how product management is changing in the age of AI, and evidence you have applied it to your own work and to your team's. Direct hands-on use of modern AI development tooling like Claude, Codex, Cursor, or comparable in your own daily workflow.

• Experience running or contributing to platform investment decisions and to customer migrations off legacy or acquired products onto a unified platform. Comfortable with the commercial, technical, and change-management shape of that work.

• Prior contribution to M&A activity like theses, diligence, integration planning is a strong plus.

• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can frame a Product Area strategy for the ELT and board and a sprint tradeoff for an engineer in the same afternoon.

• Directness paired with real care for people. You give honest feedback, build trust quickly, and grow the people around you.

• Comfort with pace and ambiguity. Rightsline is a PE-backed enterprise SaaS company mid-transformation; you are steady when priorities evolve with new learnings.

How We’ll Know You Are the One

• You are a champion of the builder era of product management. You have opinions about flat operating models vs. layered management, about coaching Lead PMs into strategy owners, and about the discipline itself evolving in the age of AI.

• You are AI-native, not AI-curious. You use modern AI tooling in your own work and can lead your team through the shift by example.

• You hire and level up teams that raise the bar. Every reference will point to specific PMs whose careers you accelerated.

• You are close to customers as a habit. You are not delegating discovery; you are still doing it yourself and teaching the craft personally.

• You can hold the room with the CPO on portfolio strategy, with the CFO on financial attribution, with Engineering leadership on architecture, and with the board on outcomes.

• You treat learning, calibration, and craft standards as first-class parts of the job.

What We Offer

• Significant impact: Direct influence over how the organization operates and executes

• Executive visibility: Close partnership with C-suite leadership and Board

• Growth opportunity: Lead a team and shape operational strategy as we scale

• Collaborative culture: Work with smart, ambitious cross-functional teams

• Competitive compensation and benefits package