Lead Product Manager, Detection and ResponseLocation: BostonBuild the Future of Cyber Security Detection and Response

The battle between attackers and defenders is asymmetrical. Organizations struggle to gather the people or resources to keep attackers out. In such a world, it is critical for security teams to detect attackers in their networks and then respond to them before they can do harm. The Detection and Response team at Rapid7 is charged with helping security organizations of all sizes and abilities achieve effective threat detection and response programs.

Today, the Rapid7 Detection and Response team offers a product, InsightIDR (IDR), and a service, Managed Detection and Response (MDR). IDR is a cloud-based Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. IDR is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. MDR is a highly-regarded service that uses IDR and delivers expertise and 24/7 operational capabilities to organizations of all sizes. We believe the combination of both a market-leading product and an excellent service gives us a distinct market advantage. 

As a Lead Product Manager on the Detection and Response team at Rapid7 you will be responsible for advancing both the product and the service through deep empathy for our users; an uncanny ability deliver not just what a customer needs, but what they ask for; a fastidious attention to detail; an understanding of our business; and an amazing ability to collaborate with others across the organization. We would love to talk with you about joining our team.

Lead Product Manager 

In this role, you will marry a knack for quickly understanding customer problems with the ability to build effective solutions that make the complex conquerable. This role is an amazing opportunity to become an impactful leader in an exciting, rapidly growing, and global technology company.

We empower our product teams to solve hard problems – customer problems and business problems – in ways that our customers love, yet work for our business. We strive to maintain durable, cross-functional teams comprised of a product manager, a designer, and several engineers. 

We staff our product teams with the skills necessary to come up with effective solutions that are valuable (our customers choose to buy or use), viable (the solution works within the many constraints of the business), usable (the user can figure out how to use) and feasible (our engineers have the skills and technology to implement).

While the product designer is accountable for ensuring the solution is usable, and the engineers are accountable for ensuring the solution is feasible, the lead product manager is accountable for ensuring the solution is both valuable and viable. 

This means that the lead product manager must contribute to her product team a solid knowledge of the various constraints of the business – constraints from marketing, sales, service, finance, legal, and privacy are typical examples. The lead product manager must also contribute to the product team a deep knowledge of our users and customers, and the data about how our customers engage with our products. Finally, the senior product manager is expected to track industry trends and the competitive landscape as they pertain to her product.

While each member of the product team may be accountable for a specific risk, we look for lead product managers that understand that consistent innovation is the result of each member of the product team contributing their passion and their ideas. The lead product manager must collaborate closely with her product designer and engineers to discover effective solutions, and then work together to deliver those solutions to market. We cannot say it strongly enough: collaboration is critical to success in this role.

While we empower our product teams to figure out the best solutions to the problems that need to be solved, we also hold those teams accountable to the results. Shipping is necessary, but not sufficient. We look for lead product managers that are not afraid of signing up for results, even when this means they have to work through others to achieve the necessary results.

This job, as with the other roles on the product team, is an individual contributor role. You will need to be able to influence your teammates, as well as colleagues, stakeholders, and key executives, through your use of data and logic. Excellent written and verbal communication skills are essential.

Responsibilities:

• With minimal oversight, deliver successful solutions that require complex execution interacting with multiple teams.

• Develop your product and domain knowledge to broadly influence roadmap themes by proactively identifying areas of opportunity.

• Confidently define one major area of the roadmap (e.g., VM scan engine or D&R Investigations), of which they have a deep understanding of the problem space and customer use cases, in a way that’s aligned to the product strategy.

• Be willing to mentor or manage a small team of product managers in a fast-growing environment, including hiring and performance management.

• Collaborate with design and engineering to discover our customer’s unmet needs.

• Talk with customers and subject-matter experts regularly in formal research settings and during product roadmap calls to understand their unmet needs.

• Work with UX researchers to put together research agendas, review research questions, identify research cohorts, sit in during customer interviews, review research findings. 

• Analyze customer usage data to create a data-informed perspective on user needs.

• Learn, understand, and stay abreast of our business. Develop working relationships with sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc. Be a voice for their interests on the product team. 

• Write and edit documents, update wiki pages, and create slide decks to communicate your plans and ideas to the rest of the team. Present your ideas to stakeholders across the organization.

• Organize work into JIRA projects, epics, and stories. Write compelling and clear user stories. Keep the team’s work properly prioritized. Create reliable delivery estimates and communicate them regularly with stakeholders.

• Define, track, and report on the post-launch success metrics for the deliverables.

• Stay abreast of security technologies in use by our customers.

• Stay abreast of trends in the technology industry and particularly in enterprise software environments.

• Stay abreast of direct competitors to our Detection and Response products and services.

Necessary Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

• Demonstrated understanding of the techniques and methods of modern product discovery and product delivery.

• 7+ years working on technology-powered products as either a product manager, product designer, engineer, data analyst, data scientist, or user researcher. 

• Demonstrated ability to learn multiple functional areas of business – engineering, design, finance, sales, or marketing.

• Demonstrated ability to figure out solutions to hard problems with many constraints, using sound judgement to assess risks, and to lay out your argument in a well-structured, data-informed, written narrative.

• Proven ability to engage with engineers, designers, and company leaders in a constructive and collaborative relationship.

• Is able to work regularly and effectively over Zoom with engineering and design teams along the East Coast of the US and Western Europe.

• Ability to travel periodically to other Rapid7 offices, partners, customers, or industry conferences as needed.

• Deep empathy for customers and users.

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience in the information security or cybersecurity field

• Experience in the enterprise software market

• Experience with services companies

• A passion for security and making the world a safer place

Diverse Perspectives:

We know that innovation thrives on product teams where diverse points of view come together to solve hard problems in ways that are just now possible. As such, we explicitly seek people that bring diverse life experiences, diverse educational backgrounds, diverse cultures, and diverse work experiences. Please be prepared to share with us how your perspective will bring something unique and valuable to our product teams.