Staff Software Product Operations Manager

The Staff Software Product Operations Manager reports to the VP of Software Product Management and serves as a strategic and operational partner to Illumina’s Software Technical Product Management and Software Marketing teams. This role ensures alignment, execution, and operational excellence across our software product lifecycle — from customer persona and problem definition, roadmap building, software delivery, and customer adoption. You will lead initiatives that improve visibility, accountability, and efficiency across software product planning and delivery processes. You own a key force multiplying role, raising both the floor and the ceiling of what our Product Managers are empowered and equipped to do. 

Key Responsibilities 

Drive Operational Rhythm of the Business 

• Annual Planning: Support long-range roadmap and investment alignment across the software portfolio, grounded in customer value, market trends, and business targets. 

• Quarterly Reviews: Coordinate structured quarterly business reviews focused on roadmap progress, product performance, and resource allocation against strategic goals. 

• Weekly Business Tracking: Establish and maintain a consistent weekly rhythm for tracking key software business metrics — including usage, adoption, performance, reliability, customer satisfaction, and commercial impact. 

• Product Performance Metrics: Define and maintain dashboards that measure success across customer engagement, revenue contribution, and operational health of software products. 

Standardize Software Go-to-Market and Development Processes 

• “Product Manage the Product Manager experience” - the system you build and maintain empowers a large product management team to do consistent high-quality work in several specialty areas.  

• Define, implement, and continuously optimize scalable frameworks and tools to support software product planning and execution. 

• Standardize processes for customer segmentation, persona alignment, value hypothesis documentation, pricing strategy integration, and lifecycle management. 

• Build systems to integrate customer insights and field feedback into development planning. 

• Own the evaluation, selection, deployment, training, and adoption of software product operations tooling (e.g., road mapping tools, launch trackers, feedback systems). 

Create Visibility Across Software Programs 

• Build and maintain dashboards, reports, and KPIs that enable software product leaders to make informed decisions. 

• Partner closely with Analytics, Finance, Sales, and Commercial teams to connect long-range planning with day-to-day software execution. 

• Ensure visibility into product usage, adoption trends, customer satisfaction, and business impact. 

Facilitate Strategic Alignment 

• Continuously audit and improve the processes and artifacts that connect software product managers, product marketers, engineering leads, and business unit stakeholders, and customers. 

• Help teams stay aligned on annual goals, customer value hypotheses, roadmap commitments, and financial performance. 

Champion Continuous Improvement 

• Identify bottlenecks or gaps in the market segmentation, persona mapping, customer understanding, product planning, and launch communication lifecycle. 

• Lead cross-functional retrospectives, root cause analyses, and implementation of operational improvements. 

• Manage the software product operations toolchain, including the evaluation, rollout, and enablement of process and platform improvements, focused on a smart and aggressive adoption of AI tools to benefit team product managers and customers. 

Minimum Qualifications 

• 7+ years of experience in Product Operations, Product Management, or Program Management roles within SaaS, enterprise software, or regulated software environments. 

• Proven ability to operate effectively in a matrixed, fast-paced organization with multiple stakeholders. 

• Strong experience using tools like Jira, Confluence, Aha!, Tableau, and/or Salesforce. 

• Ability to define and track metrics such as ARR impact, roadmap progress, launch consistency, and customer adoption. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience in the genomics, healthcare, or regulated software (e.g., IVDR, HIPAA) domains. 

• Familiarity with usage-based pricing models and customer-centric persona frameworks. 

• Experience working with AI/ML-powered SaaS or bioinformatics software is a plus. 

Why Join Us 

You’ll play a highly leveraged role improving how Illumina builds, positions, and delivers its next-generation software offerings. Join a team that’s defining how software enables sequencing at scale, unlocks a deeper biology, and ultimately, how we improve lives through software and AI. 

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