Principal Product Operations Manager

About the group:

Branch is looking for a Principal Product Operations leader with a proven background building scalable processes and growing high-performing teams in a SaaS environment.

This newly created opportunity reports directly to the VP of Product and owns all product operations to drive operational excellence. The ideal candidate brings a demonstrated ability to work horizontally and vertically across the organization — bridging product, data, engineering, and customer-facing teams through strong cross-functional partnerships.

In this role, you will lead cross-functional initiatives and will be responsible for designing and optimizing the end-to-end product development lifecycle, leveraging AI-powered tools and workflow automation to accelerate delivery, eliminate process bottlenecks, and surface actionable insights from data. This includes integrating AI into how we synthesize customer feedback, track roadmap health, and enable teams to make faster, better-informed decisions.

This position sits at the intersection of operational efficiency, customer-centricity, and intelligent automation — ensuring our product teams are equipped to move with speed and precision in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and scale the Product Operations function, including establishing how AI tools augment each operational role and where automation can reduce manual coordination overhead.
• Define and execute the strategic vision for product operations, establishing frameworks that enable product-led growth and operational excellence at scale — with a deliberate roadmap for how AI adoption evolves across the product org over time.
• Own end-to-end product lifecycle operations including planning processes, prioritization frameworks, delivery mechanisms, and post-launch measurement systems .
• Identify, pilot, and operationalize AI-powered tools and agentic workflows across product, engineering, and design teams, evaluating where AI can handle execution, so teams focus on higher-order decision-making.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives spanning product, engineering, GTM, and customer success to accelerate time-to-market and improve feature adoption, using automated coordination and shared intelligence layers to reduce friction across team boundaries.
• Design and operationalize a Voice of the Customer program that integrates quantitative and qualitative signals, including in-app analytics, support data, user research, and revenue impact, and deploy AI to continuously synthesize that signal at scale into prioritized, actionable product insights.
• Partner with Product Leadership and the executive team on strategic planning, resource allocation, and portfolio management decisions.
• Own product knowledge management, ensuring internal teams and customers understand product capabilities and roadmap direction, including building AI-assisted tools for self-serve knowledge access and employee onboarding.
• Establish and report on operational health metrics including delivery predictability, cycle times, adoption rates, and team efficiency indicators, instrumenting dashboards and alerting systems that surface anomalies automatically and reduce reliance on manual reporting.
  
  

You’ll be a good fit if you have:

Required:

• 12+ years in product management, product operations, technical program management, or strategy roles, with 6+ years leading operations or cross-functional teams in a B2B SaaS environment.
• Deep domain expertise in B2B SaaS product operations, preferably in adtech, martech, developer tools, or infrastructure platforms, with an understanding of how AI is reshaping product development cycles and team operating models in these spaces.
• Demonstrated success implementing organization-wide process transformations and change management in companies with 300+ employees or high-growth environments. Experience driving adoption of AI-powered tooling and workflows at scale.
• Strong executive presence with the ability to act as a translator between technical and business stakeholders, influencing leadership decisions and driving alignment across competing priorities using clear, data-backed narratives.
• Hands-on proficiency with the modern product stack: analytics platforms (Amplitude, Mixpanel), collaboration and roadmapping tools (Linear, Jira, Productboard), experimentation frameworks, and data warehousing — plus working familiarity with AI and automation platforms (n8n, Zapier, Make, or comparable tooling).
• Practical AI fluency: experience deploying AI/ML workflows into product development processes, building or shipping products with AI capabilities, and a working understanding of core concepts (LLMs, agents, RAG, prompt engineering) sufficient to evaluate tools, guide implementation, and hold technical teams accountable.
• Proven track record of establishing metrics-driven cultures. Experience designing dashboards, goal frameworks, and operational reporting that surface actionable insights at the leadership level, with increasing emphasis on AI-assisted anomaly detection and automated reporting pipelines.
• Strategic systems thinker who can redesign workflows from a zero-based, outcome-first perspective rather than automating legacy processes. Focus on translating business objectives into operational frameworks while remaining hands-on when needed.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to distill complex operational challenges into clear narratives for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience leading in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments with shifting business needs, with particular comfort managing the pace of change that comes with integrating rapidly evolving AI capabilities into existing team workflows and product processes.

This role is 100% remote in Canada. This role does not qualify for relocation or visa sponsorship. 

In accordance with applicable law, the following represents a reasonable estimated compensation range for this role: the estimated pay range for this role, if based in Canada is 175,000 CAD to 227,000 CAD. Please note that this information is provided for those hired in Canada only. Compensation for candidates outside of Canada will be based on the candidate’s specific work location. Actual compensation will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location and may be more or less than the amount shown above. This role additionally includes a 10% annual bonus tied to company goals.