Principal Product Management

Who you are

• 8–12 years of product management experience, with 4+ years specifically in growth, PLG, or self-serve product roles
• Direct P&L ownership at portfolio scope — a loop or portfolio you've driven from <$X to >$Y with your name on the number, not a feature inside someone else's loop
• Experience presenting to CEO / CRO / CFO / board on growth mechanics — the credit-economics deck, the funnel narrative, the "kill this bet" moment
• Track record of hiring, mentoring, or calibrating other growth PMs — comfortable being the bar
• You're a builder. You ship landing pages, signup flows, and in-product experiments — not specs that sit in Jira. You sit with designers and engineers, write copy, and prototype with code
• AI-fluent with a public POV. You understand that LLMs are becoming a primary discovery surface. You have opinions — publishable ones — about agent-readable flows, MCP-as-distribution, GEO/AEO, and how an AI agent's recommendation impacts a funnel
• Marketing-fluent. You hold your own with SEO, paid acquisition, content, and lifecycle marketing teams as a peer, not a consumer
• Demonstrated track record of running structured experimentation (A/B tests, multivariate, holdouts, pre/post) at sprint cadence — including at cohort sizes where 50/50 doesn't have power
• Strong analytics fluency — comfortable in Snowflake without analyst hand-holding
• Working knowledge of consumption-based pricing, credit economics, freemium mechanics, and PQL frameworks
• B2B SaaS background; data, GTM, or sales-tech domain experience is a plus but not required
• Funnel Foundation. Expert-level understanding of full-funnel growth. You can reason about activation rates, time-to-value, retention curves, credit economics, upgrade triggers, and PQL signal quality with depth
• You've owned a growth loop — or portfolio — in production. SQL and analytics fluency let you diagnose a funnel drop, prototype the fix, and validate it in the same week
• Portfolio Thinking. You reason about ToF (or an equivalent surface) as a portfolio of channels with different unit economics, decay curves, and compounding dynamics — not a single funnel. You rebalance investment quarterly based on where marginal dollars return the most, and you can defend the rebalance to leadership with the math
• Experimentation Discipline. You don't ship without a hypothesis. You pre-register the metric and the invalidation signal before the test runs
• You read results honestly, kill losing variants without ego, and document learnings so the team compounds knowledge instead of relitigating settled questions. You know the difference between an experiment and a launch — and you can tell when each is the right move
• Category POV. You have a public, defensible point of view on where PLG distribution is heading — agent-readable surfaces, MCP-as-channel, GEO/AEO, LLM-first onboarding — grounded in benchmarks from peer companies (Clay, Linear, Vercel, Cursor, Notion), not just internal data. That POV shows up in the roadmap
• Distribution Mindset. Experience designing growth surfaces where sales teams, marketing teams, and self-serve users are simultaneously your customers
• You measure success through revenue, consumption, and expansion velocity, not screens shipped
• You understand growth economics: each additional entry point, freemium offer, or AI trial compounds in value through shared activation patterns, amortized acquisition costs, and recurring consumption network effects
• Operational Velocity. You read the funnel daily, not quarterly
• You prototype emerging mechanics — paywalls, in-app prompts, lifecycle sequences — to understand their practical constraints before committing engineering time
• You hold strong opinions weakly, updating your design assumptions as evidence accumulates, publicly, even when the prior thesis was your own
• Strategic Communication. You translate between funnel depth and business impact fluently
• You can explain to the CEO why a credit pricing change is worth a quarter of work. You can communicate to engineers why a revenue constraint requires a "quiet release" in two weeks rather than a polished launch in three months
• You influence without formal authority through forcing functions, falsifiable invalidation signals, and earned credibility
• Talent Leverage. You coach Sr PMs into full ownership of their loops. Your retro is their template. Your experiment quality is their bar
• You help hire the next PMs on the team, and you calibrate — you know what "great" looks like at Sr level and you can articulate the gap to someone who isn't there yet
• Copy Instinct. Microcopy is part of your craft, not someone else's job. You can rewrite a paywall headline, an upgrade modal, an empty state, or an onboarding CTA on instinct — and defend the rewrite with PLG principles
• You know when to ask content design for help and when to ship the rewrite yourself

What the job involves

• Own a Growth Portfolio and Set the Pattern the Rest of the Team Inherits
• ZoomInfo built the industry's most sophisticated GTM data platform. The next frontier is turning every visitor into revenue without waiting on a human handoff — a coherent self-serve journey that activates a non-customer in minutes, converts consumption into upgrade, and routes high-intent signals back to sales when a human will close more than they distract
• You'll define the multi-quarter thesis on which channels compound, the operating rhythm the rest of the growth PM team inherits, and the ZoomInfo POV on how buyers discover us in an AI-first world
• The impact is immediate and compounding. Every signup you activate, every credit you cause to be consumed, every transaction, every PQL you route, every "buy more" event you trigger is revenue — and every operating pattern you set multiplies across the growth PM group
• We've adopted a consumption-first monetization model and a unified entry-point thesis across the company, and we run weekly: if your hypothesis can't be falsified inside a sprint, it isn't a hypothesis. This is a rare opportunity to own a P&L-shaped surface with full air cover to ship fast, learn in public, re-pivot when the data turns — and to define the growth PM craft as ZoomInfo scales it
• Take a portfolio-scope growth surface — and own it from first impression to revenue. Define the entry points, the activation milestones, the monetization moments, and the sales-assist signals across the channels that make up the portfolio
• Drive the user experience across surfaces: landing, signup, in-product onboarding, empty states, upgrade modals, paywalls, lifecycle communication, and the agent-readable / LLM-discovery surfaces that are becoming primary
• You own the funnel chart; you own the why behind every drop
• Beyond weekly experiments, own 4-8 quarter bets on which channels compound and which retire. Publish a written POV on where PLG distribution is heading (LLM-first discovery, MCP-as-channel, agent-readable onboarding, partner-driven trials) and defend the sequencing to the exec team
• Rebalance investment across the portfolio quarterly based on unit economics, not the loudest channel
• Ship 8-10 experiments per sprint
• Pre-register the hypothesis, the metric, the success threshold, and — critically — the invalidation signal
• Read results weekly, kill what doesn't work, double down on what does, and keep a written record so the team compounds learning instead of repeating it
• Your rubric, your retro format, and your invalidation-signal standard become the template the rest of the Growth PM group inherits
• Translate results into concrete changes: copy rewrites, schema tweaks, pricing changes, new flows, retired ones
• Close the loop with engineering, design, and analytics inside the same week
• Most users on your portfolio never speak to sales before they hit a "buy more" moment
• Your in-product copy, paywall framing, empty states, activation paths, and upgrade triggers are the product
• Apply growth-engineering rigor — credit economics, consumption pacing, signal routing, lifecycle messaging, intelligent gating — so the right offer lands in front of the right user at exactly the right moment
• Hand high-intent users to sales with a clean signal; absorb low-intent users with a clean self-serve path
• Data is your default tool, not a thing you ask analytics to do for you
• You independently analyze the funnel, segment the cohort, find the leak, and propose the fix — then validate it with an experiment
• You know when to trust a 5% lift and when to call it noise
• Just as important: you know when to zoom out from a specific funnel drop to a portfolio-level rebalance, and can defend that call
• You'll design the credit economics of your portfolio: what's free, what's gated, what gets a "buy more" prompt, what triggers a PQL
• You'll model the unit economics — credit cost, revenue per credit, upgrade rate, expansion rate — and you'll defend the pricing decisions in front of finance and sales leadership with the math
• Self-serve doesn't mean alone. You'll route PQLs into the right hands (AE, SC, AM, or no one), partner with marketing on acquisition and lifecycle, and work with CS to understand why activated users churn before upgrade
• You'll run the operating cadences that keep your portfolio aligned with the broader PLG portfolio without becoming a meeting machine
• Help hire and calibrate the Sr Growth PMs owning adjacent loops. Coach them into ownership
• Your retro is their template; your experiment quality is their bar. Raise the craft of the whole Growth PM group as it scales
• Write retrospectives that name the wrong calls as cleanly as the right ones
• Update your priors publicly when the data turns
• Hold strong opinions weakly
• The team that ships the most experiments isn't the team that's right the most — it's the team that updates the fastest
• Report to the VP Product, PLG. Peer to the Sr Directors of Marketing, Sales Operations, and Customer Success on the growth contracts (PQL routing, demand-gen alignment, credit economics)
• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the engineering and design leaders building the underlying surfaces, the GTM leaders routing PQLs into sales, and a peer PM group covering monetization, lifecycle, viral, onboarding, and analytics
• Regular exposure to the CEO, CRO, CMO, and CFO — you own those conversations at your level
• Pace & Problems. Fast-moving teams that understand the space. Weekly experimentation cadence layered under 4-quarter portfolio bets
• Expect interesting problems: How do we win activation in a user's first 60 seconds? When should two trial flows become one? How do we expose enough value to convert without giving away the platform? How do we price a credit so that customers consume more, not less? When should a self-serve user be routed to sales — and when does that routing actually destroy revenue? How do buyers discover ZoomInfo when discovery goes through Claude and ChatGPT?
• Your decisions become operating patterns across the PLG organization
• Impact. Own a portfolio-scope growth surface at a company that is already AI-first in product thinking and consumption-first in monetization
• Your decisions compound. Every improvement to the funnel, the offer, or the activation experience multiplies across multiple products, every partner-driven self-serve channel ZoomInfo ships into, and every AI distribution surface we haven't yet imagined — and every operating pattern you set makes the next PM on the team better
• What changed at a glance:
• Title + opening reframed from loop-scope → portfolio-scope, ToF-leaning but flexible
• Three new sections in What You'll Do: Set the Multi-Quarter Thesis, Represent PLG to Leadership, Multiply the Team
• Seniority bar: 4-7 yrs → 8-12 yrs; adds direct P&L ownership, exec/board presenting, hiring/mentoring
• Two new competencies: Portfolio Thinking, Category POV, Talent Leverage
• Reporting line: Sr Director → VP Product, PLG; peer to CRO/CMO/CFO direct reports

Benefits

• Benefits for the Best You - We want our employees and their families to thrive. In addition to comprehensive benefits we offer holistic mind, body and lifestyle programs designed for overall well-being
• Base Pay - We attract and retain the best talent with competitive compensation that aligns with industry benchmarks and merit programs yearly for promotions and salary increases based on performance, time in role, and position to market
• Bonus - When you crush it, we like to celebrate! Bonuses are awarded annually in connection with company and individual performance
• Equity - We offer each employee a generous equity award in the form of RSUs, so they can directly feel the results and success of their hard work
• Vacation & Time Off - We know everyone's needs are different so we offer flexible paid time off plans including an unlimited vacation option for many employees
• Hybrid Working Model - We offer flexible hybrid remote working models to promote equity, employee wellness, and work life balance