Technology Product Lead
Why This Role Exists
We are building a Product organization to bring clear ownership, prioritization, and outcome accountability to critical technology platforms that power our business.
Today, much of our platform and systems engineering work is executed through strong teams and capable technology, but without consistent end-to-end ownership of outcomes, clear value identification, or transparent measurement of impact. Important work gets delivered, but it’s often difficult to answer fundamental questions:
- Why is this the right work right now?
- What outcomes are we driving?
- How do we know it’s working?
The Technical Product Lead role exists to close that gap.
This role establishes a single accountable owner for the “what and why” across defined product areas — while remaining close enough to execution to ensure clarity, momentum, and learning. This is a senior individual contributor role with meaningful decision authority and hands-on responsibility across both strategy and delivery.
How We Think About Product Ownership
We view product ownership as a continuous spectrum, not a fixed state:
- NOW: Capability-based ownership and platform stabilization
- NEXT: Value-aligned recomposition and shared accountability
- LATER: True end-to-end value streams with economic ownership
Importantly:
The work does not change.
Only how we frame ownership, outcomes, and success evolves.
Technical Product Leads are expected to operate comfortably across this spectrum — protecting near-term execution while intentionally shaping longer-term outcome ownership.
What You’ll Own
Product Leads are anchored to one or more capability-aligned product areas, such as:
- Core Transaction Platforms
- Commercial Enablement
- Enterprise Data & Intelligence
- Developer & Platform Enablement
- Trust, risk, and compliance
While each Product Lead is assigned to a specific area, the scope is intentionally designed to evolve from platform stewardship toward outcome and value-driven ownership over time.
Role Mandate
As a Product Lead, you are accountable for:
- Defining what should be built and why
- Making priority and scope tradeoffs within defined investment guardrails
- Owning product outcomes, not just delivery
- Ensuring clarity and continuity from strategy through execution
This role blends strategic thinking with hands-on product work. Product Leads are expected to move fluidly between defining outcomes, shaping work, and partnering with delivery teams to ensure intent is clearly understood and executed.
What You’ll Do
Product Vision, Strategy & Outcomes
- Shape and evolve product vision and roadmaps aligned to organizational goals and technology strategy
- Translate business objectives into clear product outcomes, hypotheses, and success measures
- Align platform capabilities to KPI oriented outcomes such as scalability, reliability, automation, efficiency, and risk reduction
- Advocate for investments that measurably improve productivity and operational effectiveness
- Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term strategic outcomes
Hands-On Product Ownership & Execution
- Own product backlogs end-to-end, ensuring work is clearly defined, sequenced, and aligned to outcomes
- Write and refine epics, features, and user stories as needed — especially for complex, high-impact, or ambiguous work
- Lead backlog building and ongoing refinement to maintain a healthy, outcome-oriented pipeline of work
- Partner closely with engineering and architecture to shape solutions, identify dependencies, and surface risks early
- Validate usefulness and impact of delivered capabilities with internal users and stakeholders
Leadership, Decision-Making & Collaboration
- Serve as the primary decision-maker for prioritization, sequencing, and scope within your product area
- Foster collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement across cross-functional teams
- Empower teams with clarity of intent while allowing flexibility in how work is delivered
- Make informed decisions under ambiguity, time pressure, or incomplete information
- Actively remove obstacles to progress and value delivery
Ceremonies, Cadence & Flow
- Lead or actively participate in key product-focused ceremonies, including backlog refinement and product planning
- Ensure shared understanding of priorities, intent, and success criteria across teams
- Partner with delivery leaders to support agile ways of working without becoming process-bound
- Adjust focus and level of involvement as products, teams, and maturity evolve
Stakeholder Engagement & Communication
- Act as the primary liaison between engineering, architecture, business partners, and leadership
- Communicate priorities, progress, tradeoffs, and outcomes clearly and consistently
- Maintain transparency to build trust and alignment across teams and departments
- Continuously gather feedback and pain points to inform roadmap and backlog decisions
Metrics, Learning & Value Realization
- Define and track KPIs tied to efficiency, performance, reliability, and business impact
- Use data and analytics to inform prioritization and validate hypotheses
- Monitor adoption and outcomes of delivered capabilities
- Translate results and learning into roadmap and backlog adjustments
Required Skills:
- 8+ years of experience in technical product management, technical product leadership, or related roles
- Demonstrated ability to own outcomes and operate hands-on at the delivery level
- Experience writing epics, features, and user stories in complex technical environments
- Proven ability to make prioritization and scope tradeoffs aligned to business value
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a data-driven mindset
- Experience partnering closely with engineering, architecture, and operations teams
- Comfort operating in ambiguity and influencing without formal authority
- Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
Preferred Skills:
- Background in platform engineering, infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or enterprise systems
- Experience in organizations transitioning from project-centric to product-centric models
- Familiarity with agile and lean product practices in enterprise environments
KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES
- Relationships – Build valuable relationships with people, facts and context. Unlock the power of people to overcome challenges to achieve more.
- Creativity – Apply integrated thinking to produce unprecedented value. Combine new facts and deeper understanding people’s purpose and concerns to generate a surplus of ideas.
- Collaboration – Develop aggressive yet realistic plans. Work collaboratively to make the best decision on allocation of time, resources and talent.
- Accountability – Get the job done. Be clear on who is going to do what and when.
- Learning – Lead in a developmental environment. Turn learning into action. Embrace change and appreciate others.
- Transformational leader with the heart of serving others.
TOTAL REWARDS
- This role is also eligible for a competitive benefits package that includes: medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance; 401(k) retirement plan; flexible spending and HSA accounts; paid holidays; paid time off; paid volunteer days; employee assistance program; tuition assistance; parental leave; military leave assistance; QTS scholarship for dependents; wellness program, and other company benefits.
- This position is bonus eligible.
We conform to all the laws, statutes, and regulations concerning equal employment opportunities and affirmative action. We strongly encourage women, minorities, individuals with disabilities and veterans to apply to all of our job openings. We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin, age, disability status, Genetic Information & Testing, Family & Medical Leave, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We prohibit retaliation against individuals who bring forth any complaint, orally or in writing, to the employer or the government, or against any individuals who assist or participate in the investigation of any complaint or discrimination claim.
The "Know Your Rights" Poster is included here:
Know Your Rights (English)
Know Your Rights (Spanish)
The pay transparency policy is available here:
Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Poster-Formatted
QTS is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process, please send an e-mail to talentacquisition@qtsdatacenters.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.
