Senior Staff Product Manager, Tekion
Transformation
+ stock options
End-to-end, AI-native platform for automotive retail
Open for applications
End-to-end, AI-native platform for automotive retail
1001+ employees
Open for applications
+ stock options
1001+ employees
Company mission
To build the world's best business applications in the cloud.
Role
Who you are
- We are looking for a Senior Staff Product Manager
What the job involves
- Act as the primary voice of dealer operations within product discussions, bringing deep, credible retail experience to every conversation about platform design and prioritisation
- Serve as a subject matter expert on complex operational domains including sales administration, vehicle stock management, retail accounting integration, and the handoff points between front-of-house and back-office processes
- Partner with Tekion's product leadership to provide structured input into the ARC platform roadmap, ensuring international market nuances — particularly UK and Canadian regulatory, tax, and workflow differences — are reflected in product direction
- Review and challenge product decisions where proposed approaches would create operational friction or fail to reflect how enterprise dealer groups actually work
- Lead the thinking on how retail operations and accounting should connect within the ARC platform, reducing the friction that enterprise groups typically experience at the boundary of front-end sales and back-office financial processes
- Define and document how stock management — from vehicle ordering and part-exchange to stocking plans and aged inventory — should be handled within a modern, integrated platform at scale
- Identify integration gaps and misalignments between retail and accounting workflows, and work collaboratively across product, engineering, and implementation teams to address them systematically
- Build the standards and reference models that allow large enterprise dealer groups to adopt the platform confidently, with a clear view of how complex operational scenarios are handled
- Drive a transformation-first engagement model with prospective and existing enterprise customers — leading with platform capability and operational best practice rather than collecting lists of legacy-system requirements
- Develop transformation frameworks, operational blueprints, and change readiness tools that help enterprise dealer groups understand what operating on ARC looks like at steady state
- Engage directly with senior operational and finance stakeholders at dealer groups during pre-sales, onboarding, and post-go-live phases, building the credibility and trust that complex transformations demand
- Feed real-world implementation and adoption insights back into the product cycle, closing the loop between what customers experience and what the platform delivers
- Own the retail and operational perspective for UK and Canadian markets, building a detailed understanding of how market-specific dynamics — franchise agreements, VAT/GST treatment, stocking structures, OEM relationships — affect platform requirements
- Develop a scalable model for international retail operations insight that can extend to additional markets as Tekion's international footprint grows
- Represent Tekion externally at industry events, dealer group forums, and OEM discussions where operational expertise and transformation credibility are required
Our take
Car dealerships suffer from an inefficiency problem. The paperwork and administration required to complete a sale requires dealers to manage a disjointed set of various software applications. Tekion is offering an enticing remedy - a cloud-based automotive retail system that integrates the various software applications in a single infrastructure.
Competition has been strong, with rivals CDK Global and Reynolds & Reynolds offering a competitive raft of features, and benefiting from strong prior relationships with dealerships. Tekion, however, has nevertheless secured customers for the software in 28 states - likely in part due to the efficiency of partnering with a single growing service as opposed to a disparate spread.
This momentum shows no signs of slowing either, as Tekion has attracted attention from major players like CMC, Chrysler and Chevrolet. By streamlining dealership operations into a single platform, the company is proving that even in a crowded market, innovation and simplicity can win. Its recent release of AI agents and an AI interface also shows it is moving with the times.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jul 2024
$200m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Oct 2021
$250m
SERIES D
Total funding: $635.1m
Company benefits
- Silicon Valley Startup Environment
- Stock Options
- Focus on Work/Life Balance
- Recognition Culture
- Health and Wellness
- Unparalleled Career Development
Company HQ
Pleasanton, CA
Leadership
Jay Vijayan
(CEO & Co-Founder)They started their career at Oracle, where they spent over 7 years in Management before spending 4 at VMware. They then worked at Tesla for 4 years, leaving their position as CIO to found Tekion in February 2016.
Guru Sankararaman
(COO & Co-Founder)After working as a Chief Architect at Cisco, they joined Tesla for 4 years. Initially they served as Director of Information Technology and then later became VP of Information Technology. Left this role to co-found Tekion in 2016.
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