Senior Product Manager - Confluent

Job description

**Introduction** At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. **Your Role And Responsibilities** Confluent's enterprise customers operate complex, distributed streaming platforms across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. They need world-class observability, management, and governance interfaces to operate these platforms confidently at scale. Unified Stream Manager (USM) and Control Center are the products that deliver this experience — providing operators with the tools to monitor, manage, and govern their Confluent Platform and Confluent Private Cloud deployments. This PM will own the product strategy and execution for our hybrid control plane, ensuring that Confluent delivers an industry-leading operations experience for self-managed and private cloud customers. **What You Will Do** The PM will: - Define and execute the product strategy and roadmap, driving adoption and customer success - Lead the evolution of USM as the modern, cloud-native management and observability surface for Confluent Platform and Confluent Private Cloud - Drive the Control Center roadmap, balancing maintenance of the existing product with the strategic migration path toward USM - Own the observability story for self-managed Confluent — including metrics integration with third-party monitoring systems (e.g., Dynatrace, Datadog, Prometheus) - Collaborate closely with engineering, design, field, and support teams to deliver capabilities that reduce operational burden for customers - Measure and report on product adoption, customer satisfaction, and business impact - Partner with GTM teams to enable field communication, customer onboarding, and competitive positioning **Preferred Education** Master's Degree **Required Technical And Professional Expertise** The PM must: - Have deep experience with enterprise observability, monitoring, and operations tooling — familiarity with platforms like Grafana, Datadog, Dynatrace, Prometheus, or similar - Understand enterprise platform management — deployment lifecycle, configuration management, health monitoring, alerting, and governance - Demonstrate strong UX sensibility for enterprise operations interfaces (dashboards, CLIs, APIs) - Have experience with distributed systems and the operational challenges they present - Be comfortable navigating complex enterprise software ecosystems — understanding how on-prem, private cloud, and hybrid architectures differ from pure SaaS - Have 5–8+ years of product management experience, with meaningful time in infrastructure, platform, or observability domains - Demonstrate exceptional written and verbal communication skills — at Confluent, we rely heavily on documents to explain the vision and facilitate concrete communication - Show ability to drive business outcomes through product decisions