Principal Technical Product Manager

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

Toast's Technical Operations (TechOps) team makes R&D measurable and its spend accountable. We connect engineering tools and resource usage, engineering metrics and customer outcomes into one trusted view, and we provide the reliability, cost, adoption and effectiveness data that leaders use to decide what to build, standardize or retire. As AI speeds up how Toast builds software, it also changes what we spend and how we need to track it.

We are looking for a Principal Technical Product Manager to bring product discipline to this work. Our work starts from a business need, and you will dig into it with the people who have it and shape it into requirements and products they rely on. Your areas include Comprehensive Operational Reporting and FinOps tools for COGS management and software capitalization. You will report to the head of Technical Operations, who owns how we build and makes the final call on priorities. You own the what and the why: customer insight, value definition, product strategy and roadmap recommendations. We expect you to bring an independent point of view and challenge assumptions. You will also support Toast's SRE tooling team with product management for the internal tools engineers use to run production.

A day in the life (Responsibilities)

• Get close to internal customers. Run user research with R&D leaders, engineering managers and Finance to understand the decisions they make, their jobs to be done, and where today's reports fall short.
• Shape the product strategy. Develop and drive the strategy for TechOps products, in line with the team's overall direction and Toast's goals.
• Turn business needs into well-scoped requirements. Write PRDs with measurable success criteria.
• Recommend what to build first. Each quarter, develop roadmap recommendations with engineering input. Surface the tradeoffs, bring a recommendation with your reasoning, and raise cross-team dependencies in the monthly portfolio review.
• Build tight feedback loops. Ship in small increments to pilot users, hold regular reviews with Finance and engineering leaders, and use usage data and feedback to decide what changes next.
• Manage adoption and lifecycle. Define target customers, adoption goals and measures of customer value. Track whether each capability solves the problem it was built for, and recommend whether to invest further, standardize, make it self-service, consolidate or retire it.
• Support SRE tooling. Bring the same research and requirements practice to the SRE tooling team, helping define problems and success measures for tools used by on-call engineers.

**This is a hybrid role requiring two days in the office per week**

What you'll need to thrive (Requirements)

• 7+ years of technical product management experience, including data, analytics, reporting or internal platform products.
• A track record of user research and discovery: interviews, jobs-to-be-done, usability testing, and turning qualitative and quantitative evidence into requirements.
• Experience taking ambiguous, compliance driven, lightly documented problems and producing crisp PRDs, success metrics and phased plans.
• Comfort with data. You write SQL, understand how data pipelines source and transform data, read data models, challenge metric definitions, and work out why two numbers disagree.
• Experience building for internal customers such as Finance, People teams or engineering, and aligning senior stakeholders without direct authority.
• Concise, structured written and verbal communication.
• Daily use of AI tools in your own work, from research to analysis to writing.

Nice to haves

• Experience with FinOps, cloud or AI cost management,
• Expereince with COGS or software capitalisation,
• Experience with engineering productivity metrics, or SRE and incident tooling.

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.