Digital Product Manager

Career Area:

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other.  We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Product Strategy

• Defines and governs product vision, strategy, and multi‑year roadmaps for platform and ecosystem products aligned with Caterpillar Digital and enterprise business strategy.
• Translates business objectives, market needs, and customer outcomes into product‑level capabilities and investment priorities.
• Partners with architects and engineering leaders to ensure product strategy is technically viable, scalable, secure, and sustainable.

Cross‑Platform & Portfolio Leadership

• Provides product leadership across multiple platforms, domains, or value streams, ensuring consistency, reuse, and architectural alignment.
• Influences prioritization and sequencing of work across portfolios to optimize enterprise value delivery.
• Resolves complex trade‑offs across scope, cost, risk, platform constraints, and long‑term technical direction.

Delivery Oversight & Governance

• Guides and governs execution of product development activities across multiple teams, ensuring outcomes meet quality, compliance, security, and reliability expectations.
• Oversees delivery of both:
  • Functional capabilities (product features, APIs, integrations)
  • Non‑functional capabilities (performance, scalability, observability, availability, regulatory compliance)
• Establishes and monitors product success measures, including adoption, platform usage, reliability, and customer satisfaction.

Platform & Architectural Alignment

• Partners with Principal Engineers and System Architects to:
  • Shape target‑state architectures
  • Influence platform evolution and technical standards
  • Align product requirements with platform constraints and capabilities
• Ensures product decisions reinforce enterprise architecture direction and avoid fragmentation or duplication.

Organizational Influence & Mentorship

• Acts as a senior advisor to business leaders and executives on product strategy, risks, trade‑offs, and investment decisions.
• Represents product leadership in architecture councils, governance forums, and strategic planning reviews.
• Mentors Senior Product Managers, Product Owners, and emerging product leaders, raising overall product maturity across the organization.

Experience

• 14–18 years of progressive experience in digital product management, platform product management, or large‑scale enterprise technology products.
• Demonstrated ownership of enterprise or platform‑level products supporting multiple customer‑facing applications or business units.
• Proven success leading complex, cross‑organizational initiatives with significant ambiguity and scale.

Education & Knowledge

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (advanced degree preferred).
• Deep understanding of platform engineering, cloud‑native architectures, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Strong knowledge of IT and IoT‑enabled digital ecosystems, preferably in industrial or equipment‑centric domains.

Technical Competencies

Platform & Systems Engineering Acumen

• Demonstrated ability to reason about distributed systems, platform scalability, fault tolerance, resiliency patterns, and failure modes.
• Strong understanding of system decomposition, domain boundaries, and service ownership models in large‑scale platforms.
• Ability to assess architectural options and guide decisions related to monolith vs microservices, synchronous vs asynchronous communication, and centralized vs domain‑owned capabilities.

Architecture & Design Literacy

• Ability to evaluate and influence:
  • Target‑state and transitional architectures
  • Reference architectures and design standards
  • Cross‑platform integration patterns
• Comfortable reviewing and challenging:
  • Architecture diagrams
  • Sequence and dependency flows
  • Data ownership and lifecycle models
• Capable of identifying architectural risks, scalability bottlenecks, and areas of technical debt that impact long‑term product outcomes.

API, Data, and Integration Expertise

• Strong understanding of API‑first product design, including versioning, backward compatibility, lifecycle management, and developer experience considerations.
• Working knowledge of event‑driven architectures, messaging patterns, and data streaming concepts.
• Ability to reason about data semantics, data contracts, and integration responsibilities across platforms and consuming applications.

Cloud, Security, and Compliance Awareness

• In‑depth familiarity with cloud‑native operating models, including shared responsibility, cost‑to‑serve, and operational risk.
• Strong understanding of security and compliance considerations in enterprise platforms, including:
  • Identity and access management principles
  • Data protection and privacy
  • Regulatory and audit requirements
• Ability to influence secure‑by‑design and compliance‑by‑default product decisions.

Operational & Service‑Level Thinking

• Deep understanding of production operations and what it takes to run platforms reliably at scale.
• Ability to define and govern:
  • Service‑level objectives (SLOs) and indicators (SLIs)
  • Availability, reliability, and performance expectations
• Comfortable working with engineering teams on incident learning, operational metrics, and continuous improvement.

DevOps & Delivery Model Fluency

• Strong grasp of modern DevOps and CI/CD practices, including environments, release strategies, and deployment pipelines.
• Ability to align product roadmaps with engineering throughput, platform readiness, and operational capacity.
• Understands trade‑offs between speed, quality, risk, and sustainability in continuous delivery environments.

Leadership Competencies

• Enterprise‑level product and systems thinking
• Strategic prioritization and portfolio decision‑making
• Influence without authority at senior levels
• Clear, executive‑level communication of complex concepts
• Strong bias toward outcomes, quality, and long‑term value

Posting Dates:

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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