Gusto

Principal Product Operations Manager, Benefits

Gusto$148K — $182K *
Healthcare
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of experience in operating roles at growing startups (e.g., biz ops, product operations, consulting)
  • Proven ability to scale service strategy for SaaS products
  • Demonstrated self-starter with strong organizational skills
  • Experience managing cross-functional stakeholders and influencing senior leaders
  • Strong data literacy with comfort in using AI tools for analysis
  • Excellent communication skills for diverse audiences
  • Background in service design or benefits-related sectors is an advantage.

Responsibilities

  • Shape product development and integrate service strategy for existing customers
  • Deeply understand product and service experiences, integrating customer feedback into broader decisions
  • Lead product launches in coordination with Product Management and Customer Experience teams
  • Provide actionable business insights based on data analysis to influence strategy
  • Drive cross-functional initiatives and communicate service enhancement roadmaps
  • Utilize hypothesis-driven problem-solving to support business growth
  • Advance AI fluency within the team and prototype service solutions using AI tools.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to transform a business and enhance customer experience
  • Collaboration with diverse cross-functional teams
  • Focus on customer feedback and service co-design for product lifecycle
  • Work in a creative and committed team environment
  • Flexible work opportunities including hybrid arrangements in major cities.
  • Access to emerging AI tools to support job functions
  • Contribution to advancing the Product Operations practice at Gusto.
Full Job Description
About the Role:

Are you looking for an opportunity to transform a business? Gusto is looking for a strategic, customer-focused leader to leverage customer feedback and operational key metrics to develop actionable insights and strategies that shape our product and service, and positively impact customer love.

Working with the Product, Engineering, Design and Customer Experience teams, you will be expected to tackle both highly strategic and deeply operational initiatives to deliver value for customers and Gusto. You'll be customer-obsessed, business-minded, strategic, detail-oriented, and highly creative.

In this role, you'll help stand up the operational and service foundation for a new Gusto product, using both deep human judgment and emerging AI tools to move faster and make better decisions. If this sounds exciting to you, we'd love to connect!

About the Team:

The Benefits Product Operations team at Gusto is made up of committed, creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to enable Benefits for all small and mid-sized businesses and their employees. We're a highly cross-functional team focused on ensuring our product and service are co-designed and co-developed along the product lifecycle to deliver a best in class customer experience; Gusto is listening to, synthesizing and acting on customer and front-line team feedback; and that cross-functional teams are collaborating and swimming together to build the best version of Gusto for our customers.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day:
  • Shape and support product development and its integration into service strategy for existing customers across the product lifecycle, in collaboration with Engineering, Design, Product Management, and Customer Experience teams.
  • Understand our product and end-to-end service experience and organizations in intimate detail, including internal and external pain points and feedback. Collaborate to ensure customer support considerations are integrated into broader company decisions.
  • Lead and partner on product launches between Product Management and Customer Experience (CX) teams to ensure readiness and deliver insights post-launch to ensure a positive experience for customers and internal teams.
  • Provide business insights and recommendations based on quantitative and qualitative data to influence strategy and operational design in both product and service roadmaps.
  • Identify and drive cross-functional initiatives that will deliver value for customers and Gusto. Help develop and communicate a clear roadmap for enhancing service capabilities and experiences.
  • Hypothesis-driven problem solving to drive our business.
  • Contribute to advancing the Product Operations craft at Gusto and build AI fluency within the team:
    • Model how to use AI tools to accelerate service design, insight synthesis, and agent-driven operational workflows.
    • Identify and build AI-assisted operational workflows, including agents, to accelerate VoC synthesis, launch readiness monitoring, and cross-functional signal aggregation.
    • Use AI tools to prototype service solutions and surface requirements faster, compressing the feedback loop between customer signal and product/service response - before full engineering investment.

Here's what we're looking for:
  • 10+ years of relevant work experience at growing startups in operating roles (i.e., biz ops/strategy roles, product operations, project/program management, and/or consulting):
    • Experience scaling service strategy alongside growing SaaS products, including incubating products, building and managing product betas, and/or integrating new products into a scalable best-in-class service model.
    • Highly adaptable and resilient to changes in business needs or requirements, with the ability to navigate challenges and make decisions even when information is incomplete.
  • Demonstrated self-starter and organized problem-solver. Self-sufficient, resourceful, and bias for action towards continuous improvement.
  • Experienced with managing a variety of cross-functional stakeholders on complex strategic initiatives, including influencing senior leaders in Product or Customer Experience orgs.
  • Strong data literacy and results-orientation, with the ability to identify the right questions, interpret quantitative and qualitative signals, and translate findings into decisions - including comfort using AI-assisted tools for analysis and synthesis.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to effectively communicate complex subjects to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Demonstrated AI fluency in an operational and product context - comfort using AI tools to synthesize qualitative data, identify automation opportunities in service workflows, and building or directing AI agents to reduce manual operational lift:
    • Experience prototyping with AI (e.g., Claude, Cursor, Codex or similar) is a plus.
  • Experience with service design and/or service blueprinting.
  • Experience working in the healthcare or benefits space (PEO, health insurance, etc.) is a plus; candidates with new product incubation experience in any complex regulated space are strongly encouraged to apply.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is $148,000/yr to $182,000/yr in Denver, and $167,000/yr to $217,000/yr for San Francisco & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

About Gusto

Gusto is a cloud-based human resources software platform that provides payroll, benefits, and HR management services to small businesses. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Gusto's platform automates many of the administrative tasks associated with HR, such as payroll processing, tax filings, and benefits administration. The company also offers a range of HR services, including compliance support, employee onboarding, and time tracking. Gusto is committed to helping small businesses succeed by providing them with the tools and resources they need to manage their HR operations more efficiently.
Learn more about Gusto
Size
1,000 employees
Industry
Founded
2012

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