Overview of the Role:
This is a high-visibility, strategic product leadership role designed to serve as the connective tissue across Salesforce’s portfolio of AI-powered products and platform capabilities. This leader will operate as a portfolio-level orchestrator—ensuring that AI innovations and core platform services built across various operating units weave together into a coherent, world-class enterprise system.
As a key leader in a brand-new team, you will help navigate a highly ambiguous, fast-paced environment. We are looking for someone who brings a fresh perspective, combining the agility and disruptive mindset of a startup with the sophisticated execution of a major cloud corporate environment. The role spans critical cross-cutting domains including AI/ML functionality, identity and access management, security architecture, and platform processes, with an additional strategic lens on pricing coherence and M&A evaluation.
Responsibilities
Strategic Portfolio & AI Alignment:
- Execute Amid Ambiguity: Help the SVP translate high-level strategy into execution-ready alignment across multiple product lines, turning ambiguity into order.
- Identify Product Misalignments: Actively look across product teams to identify gaps and friction points in AI functionality, identity, security, data architecture, and platform APIs.
- Facilitate Cross-Functional Governance: Lead product reviews and governance processes to surface and resolve ecosystem conflicts before they impact customers.
- Map the Ecosystem: Build and maintain a living map of portfolio capabilities, overlaps, gaps, and interdependencies to ensure Salesforce moves as a unified AI platform.
Cross-Functional Coordination & Influence:
- Advise Product Teams: Serve as a trusted advisor to product GMs and business unit product leaders on the portfolio-level implications of local roadmap decisions.
- Orchestrate Complex Workstreams: Apply program management rigor to keep matrixed alignment workstreams and stakeholder commitments on track.
- Executive Preparation: Partner with leadership to prepare portfolio coherence and AI strategy materials for executive and board-level planning conversations.
Pricing & Monetization Coherence:
- Flag Portfolio Risks: Partner closely with pricing, finance, and product leadership to identify inconsistencies or risks in cross-portfolio packaging and AI monetization strategies.
- Advocate for the Customer Experience: Champion intuitive, portfolio-level pricing logic without needing to own the direct pricing execution.
M&A Due Diligence & Gap Analysis:
- Assess Market Gaps: Conduct structured capability gap assessments against market shifts and competitive AI benchmarks.
- Target Identification: Identify and prioritize acquisition or partnership targets that can accelerate our horizontal AI and platform capabilities.
- Corporate Development Support: Lead the product-side due diligence on inbound and outbound M&A targets, ensuring seamless integration potential.
Required Qualifications:
- Experience: 10–15 years of total professional experience in product management, product strategy, or a closely related horizontal leadership function.
- Diverse Background: A proven track record that blends startup agility with large enterprise scale—you know how to move fast, but you also know how to successfully navigate a major cloud corporate environment.
- Fast-Paced Tech Fluency: Thrived in a fast-growing, rapidly evolving technology company where change is the only constant.
- Platform Architecture Depth: Deep familiarity with how massive platform ecosystems (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP, Salesforce, ServiceNow) are architected, governed, and monetized.
- Domain Literacy: Strong technical fluency in AI/ML workflows, identity, and security product domains. (Deep engineering depth is not required, but conceptual literacy is essential).
- Influence Without Authority: Exceptional ability to build trust, bridge silos, and win hearts and minds across matrixed organizations. You succeed by making alignment obvious, not by controlling resources.
- Comfort with Ambiguity: Experience helping to build "0-to-1" teams, processes, or frameworks where the playbook hasn't been written yet.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience supporting or leading M&A due diligence and post-merger product integration from the product side.
- Advanced degree (MBA or Technical Master’s) or equivalent practical experience.
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