Senior Product Release Manager, Amazon

• Strong program management and analytical skills, be comfortable dealing with ambiguity, and have the ability to effectively influence and communicate with global stakeholders
• Proven ability to think and move quickly and manage difficult tradeoffs to meet deadlines
• Experience in strategy, change management, release management and rolling-out large scale initiatives
• Experience executing both strategic and operational initiatives
• Experience planning, scheduling, implementing projects in a demanding, change-oriented, fast-paced environment requiring a high degree of deadline-driven productivity
• Proven ability to work with team members to design scalable processes, implement strategic projects that solve business problems, with focus on continuous improvement
• Ability to lead and work effectively with cross functional groups
• Excellent communication (verbal and written) and collaboration skills that enable you to earn trust at all levels, including senior leadership
• Experience analyzing data and best practices to assess performance drivers

Desirable

• Amazon Ads is looking for a Senior Product Release Manager, Global Release Management to lead release management globally for advertising products, tools and services that impact all Amazon advertisers and customers
• As our ad products evolve, the Release Management team's core function is to ensure all internal services teams are systematically equipped to support advertisers be successful with our products
• Beyond release planning and launch risk mitigation to protect the advertiser and customer experience, Release Management focuses on delivering operational simplification of products through upstream prioritization of features that enable effective, self-service execution for users
• Release Managers build scalable processes and mechanisms with up and downstream stakeholders in order to launch, and maintain successful ad products
• The candidate will have high standards for themselves and everyone they work with, and will be constantly looking around corners to prevent short-sighted decisions
• This role requires a strong ability to find creative solutions to challenging problems, excellent communication skills, ability to easily navigate ambiguity and define a path forward
• You must know how to influence and motivate to get the right things done
• While Product Managers drive product vision and technical requirements; Release Managers provide data-driven cross-product business understanding of releases impact and success
• They drive shared goals and gain investments prioritization alignment
• Lastly, Release Managers are excellent at driving results, able to coordinate large, multi-functional projects on-time, anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, make trade-offs, and balance business needs versus technical constraints
• They are involved in reviewing product workflow design and balance near term business need with longer term implications for Amazon
• They rationalize business priorities and technical requirements with cross-functional teams, effectively managing cross-functional communication to ensure all business and technical stakeholder’s needs are aligned
• This is a multi-faceted role requiring a breadth of skills and expertise:
• Engage with global stakeholders to understand priorities, and drive cross-team initiatives
• Identify scaled opportunities to help partners implement readiness solutions that expedite market launches and improve product performance
• Track program(s) health and success by evaluating performance and deriving insights via structured analyses in order to influence strategic decisions
• Sr. Product Release Managers lead product releases that are large in scope and impact to customers and to the advertising business
• They are expected to influence product development strategy to launch the right advertising solutions for advertisers
• They enable optimal business and investments decisions for upstream and downstream executing teams through providing data and insights that help identify opportunities for product automation and improved CX
• Beyond RM responsibilities, they autonomously gain partner buy-in and implement mechanisms that raise the release readiness bar for all advertising Products and tools globally
• They independently develop roadmaps, project plans, risks and dependency logs, releases planning calendars, status updates, and post-mortems
• They build simplified processes that automate repeatable activities, promote global standardization, improve testing rigor, remove internal process bottlenecks, and drive productivity gains
• They leverage their expertise of operational processes and their deep understanding of product architecture to influence prioritization of product requirements
• Senior Product Release Managers leverage user workflow and services expertise to enable ad products innovation into Advertiser experiences that scale
• Release Management works at the intersection of ad product and services to simplify and improve products and tools, accelerating progress toward issue-free self-service solutions
• RM owns critical business functions within CCS; 1) providing design and operational product requirement guidance for product prioritization, 2) mitigating launch impacts across services teams, 3) enabling a common business understanding of product growth and business opportunity vs. execution and CX risks, 4) managing user acceptance testing (UAT), and lastly, 5) driving ongoing open product issue resolution
• The RM team acts as the guardrail for the end-to-end user and advertiser experience successfully creating and managing ad campaigns
• As the strategic bi-directional voice between Product and Service organizations, RMs have a broad scope of product knowledge, from a deep understanding of their ad product portfolio to end-to-end systems, back-end data flows, and user experience
• RMs influence at all levels without authority by acting as the voice of the product customer (internal and advertiser) and shopper customer