Director, Product Management

Job Description:

Why should you choose us?

Rakuten Symphony is reimagining telecom, changing supply chain norms and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on proven modern infrastructure practices, its open interface platforms make it possible to launch and operate advanced mobile services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches, with no compromise to network quality or security.

Rakuten Symphony has operations in Japan, the United States, Singapore, India, South Korea, Europe, and the Middle East Africa region. For more information, visit: https://symphony.rakuten.com.

Building on the technology Rakuten used to launch Japan’s newest mobile net

work, we are taking our mobile offering global.

To support our ambitions to provide an innovative cloud-native telco platform for our customers, Rakuten Symphony is looking to recruit and develop top talent from around the globe. We are looking for individuals to join our team across all functional areas of our business – from sales to engineering, support functions to product development.

Let’s build the future of mobile telecommunications together!

About Rakuten Group, Inc. (TSE: 4755) is a global leader in internet services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Founded in Tokyo in 1997 as an online marketplace, Rakuten has expanded to offer services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content and communications to 2 billion members around the world. The Rakuten Group has over 30,000 employees, and operations in 30 countries and regions. For more information visit https://global.rakuten.com/corp/.

About the Role

Candidate would be reporting to Vice President of Products, responsible for the end-to-end product strategy, business outcomes, customer success, innovation, and commercial growth of the Site Management product portfolio. The role bridges customers, engineering, PLM, sales, solutioning, operations, and executive leadership to deliver measurable business value and competitive differentiation.

Key Responsibilities:

Product Strategy & Portfolio Leadership

• Define and own the multi-year product vision and strategy for multiple products.
• Align portfolio direction with market trends, customer requirements, and corporate growth objectives.
• Identify opportunities for platform convergence, automation, AI enablement, and operational efficiency.
• Drive product investment priorities, portfolio-level business cases, product KPIs, and success metrics.

Product Roadmap Ownership

• Own quarterly and annual product roadmaps across the portfolio.
• Prioritize features based on customer impact, revenue potential, strategic differentiation, and technical feasibility.
• Balance innovation, technical debt reduction, scalability, and customer commitments.
• Lead roadmap review sessions with executive stakeholders.

Customer & Market Engagement

• Responsible for strategic customers and conduct customer discovery workshops and executive reviews.
• Translate customer pain points into clear product requirements and business outcomes.
• Represent the portfolio in customer meetings, industry forums, analyst interactions, and product demonstrations.
• Gather competitive intelligence and market feedback to guide product positioning and investments.

AI & Automation Leadership

• Drive adoption of AI-powered capabilities across network operations, site management, workforce management, and operational intelligence.
• Identify use cases for predictive analytics, generative AI assistants, workforce optimization, and automation-led efficiency.
• Partner with engineering teams to convert AI opportunities into scalable product capabilities.
• Define measurable business outcomes from AI investments.

Business & Commercial Ownership

• Support PLM and sales teams in strategic opportunities, proposals, and major customer pursuits.
• Contribute to pricing strategy, commercial packaging, and portfolio positioning.
• Identify expansion opportunities across existing deployments.
• Track revenue contribution, product adoption, customer retention, expansion opportunities, and profitability levers.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with engineering leaders to define release priorities, resolve strategic trade-offs, improve delivery predictability, and ensure platform scalability.
• Align solutioning and delivery teams with roadmap intent, implementation realities, architecture choices, and customer adoption goals.
• Provide regular updates to leadership and influence investment decisions using business and customer data.
• Lead prioritization councils, portfolio governance, roadmap reviews, and KPI tracking.

Team Leadership

• Lead and mentor product managers and business analysts across the portfolio.
• Build a culture of customer obsession, outcome-driven execution, and product excellence.
• Establish product management best practices and operating rhythms.
• Coach teams on product discovery, requirements management, prioritization, and go-to-market planning.

Required Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, Computer Science, Telecommunications, or related fields.
• MBA preferred.

Experience

• 15+ years in product management, telecom technology, or enterprise software.
• 7+ years leading product teams or product portfolios.
• Proven experience with telecom OSS, network operations, RAN management, workforce management systems, and enterprise SaaS platforms.
• Demonstrated experience managing executive customer relationships.

Domain Expertise

• Telecom network operations and Radio Access Networks (RAN).
• Site lifecycle management and field workforce management.
• Network performance, analytics, AI/ML-driven operational automation, cloud-native architectures, and enterprise integration ecosystems.

Success Metrics – First 12 Months

• Strategic customer satisfaction and measurable customer value delivered.
• Product adoption, usage growth, roadmap predictability, and release quality.
• AI feature adoption and business impact.
• Reduction in customer pain points and escalations.
• Portfolio profitability improvement.
• Team engagement and leadership effectiveness.

RAKUTEN SHUGI PRINCIPLES:

Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviours that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

• Always improve, always advance. Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen.
• Be passionately professional. Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best.
• Hypothesize - Practice - Validate - Shikumika. Use the Rakuten Cycle to success in unknown territory.
• Maximize Customer Satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction for workers in a service industry is to see their customers smile.
• Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! Always be conscious of time. Take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team.