Sr. Product Manager - HashiCorp Vault

Vault is HashiCorp's multi-cloud security platform. Our customers use Vault for critical, tier 0 operations for secrets management, identity management, encryption as a service, certificate management, and more. This role is dedicated to enhancing and expanding core secrets management capabilities while enhancing Vault's robust, highly scalable platform.

As the product manager for Vault's core capabilities, you will own your roadmap end-to-end. This will include vital secrets management features such as secret recovery, auditing, and secret lifecycle reporting. You will also own critical feature areas for the platform layer, including performance, availability, resilience, and storage integrations features. This role is for "systems thinkers" with an eye for strategy who like to proactively own and define their roadmap. You will set the product strategy, conduct user research, define requirements, and oversee execution across engineering, marketing, support, sales, and design. You will work closely with the engineering team to support releases that continuously improve Vault for our customers. You will translate market signals, customer requests, business strategy, and common sense into a clear, actionable product vision and roadmap.

Your role and responsibilities

• Strategy & Vision: Own the multi-year product roadmap for core secrets management and platform features. Identify market opportunities and incorporate data-driven insights, customer discovery, and your own analysis into your roadmap and vision. You will choose which features to prioritize and what should be in scope for those features. You will be responsible for owning the implementation of your vision and getting buy-in from key collaborators.
• Voice of the Customer: Act as the primary bridge between R&D (engineering, design, product) and customers. You will analyze data and meet with customers to understand the "problem behind the problem" - applying your critical thinking to understand that what customers ask for isn't always exactly what they need. You will work productively with sales, support, and other internal teams.
• Execution & Delivery: Collaborate with engineering and design to deliver high quality features that meet customer needs cleanly and effectively. You will be responsible for defining the scope of projects and negotiating with design and engineering on feasibility.
• Team-oriented problem-solving: We are a growing, flexible team with a collaboration-oriented, honest culture. If you see a problem, speak up! We can help figure out how to fix it together. Engineering and design operate similarly - be honest, respectful, and open, and we'll have the best chance of getting where we want to go as a team.
• Proactivity: If you notice something not getting done in your area, you are expected to pick the problem up and figure out how to solve it. Whether this is a customer pain point, a support team frustration, or an internal process gap, we are looking for someone who will take ownership of fixing or triaging problems - you shouldn't fix everything yourself, but you shouldn't just drop it silently if it's a real issue. "Autonomy" is the name of the game. Please ask for help if you need help - as mentioned, we are a collaborative team and happy to help. But as your manager, I will rarely assign you work. I will assign you a feature area or problem space and expect you to figure out the work that has to be done for the good of the team and the product.
• Organization: You should be incredibly organized. You should know what was said in the meeting last Tuesday with the customer so you can refer back to it for decision-making. You should be able to balance multiple inputs of requests for your time and self-prioritize. I don't care what tools you use to do this - I care that you have easy access to information and can organize your own work. I am available to help, of course. But I expect that you will mostly operate autonomously.
• Relationship building: You sit at the intersection of "engineering" and "everyone else" - as the funnel, it is crucial that you build good, trusting relationships with your engineering and design counterparts and key internal stakeholders in sales, support, marketing, etc. You are responsible for seeking out information. Many times, that information will come to you through a pre-existing relationship.
• Coachability: As your manager, I expect to learn from you. I greatly appreciate feedback, opinions, and thoughts on how we can improve the team culture and processes. I also expect you to learn - whether from me or from your own mistakes. Learning and improving as you go is one of the crucial hallmarks of a great PM - I expect you to actively seek out and incorporate feedback, and contribute to a team culture where we are all doing the same. I will do my best to design a career and skills development plan that helps you get to where you want to go - I expect you to respond by working with me collaboratively.

Required education

High School Diploma/GED

Required technical and professional expertise

Experience

3+ years of experience building products. I don't care about your title - I care that you know how to synthesize customer needs, apply strategic and critical thinking, and have a hunger for learning.

Technical Depth

You don't need to have a coding background, but you do need to be able to discuss technical concepts at a relatively detailed level. As the product is highly technical and many features are not integrated with the UI, it's important to be able to understand the end-to-end developer and platform engineer experience. Conversational ease with APIs, cloud services providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), and databases are all pros.

Writing

HashiCorp has a heavy writing culture. This enables asynchronous collaboration and alignment on requirements and plans without having to schedule twenty different meetings to review them. You should be a solid writer who is able to get your ideas down on paper. You don't need to be Shakespeare, but you do need to be able to communicate. You also need to be willing to read documents that are sent to you - if you're the sort of person who responds to every document someone sends you with "schedule a meeting with me," you're probably not a good fit for the role. (Sometimes a meeting is necessary, but you should give a good faith effort to engage with the document first.)