Product Lifecycle Manager Hybrid, Cary, North Carolina

About the job

We’re looking for an individual contributor Product Lifecycle Manager to help SAS make disciplined, transparent, and data-informed lifecycle decisions across the product portfolio. This role partners across Product Management, Product Commercialization, R&D, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Legal, Finance, Support, and other stakeholders to ensure products are managed thoughtfully from beginning-of-life through ongoing lifecycle optimization, migration, and end-of-life, with an emphasis on executing the cross-functional programs and operations needed to support lifecycle decisions and outcomes.

The Product Lifecycle Manager brings structure, customer context, and business judgment to lifecycle decisions so SAS can invest in the right products, protect customer trust, support revenue retention, and free capacity for strategic innovation. This role is expected to operationalize lifecycle direction through clear readiness plans, repeatable practices, and coordinated execution across teams.

As a Product Lifecycle Manageryou will:

• Execute cross-functional programs and operations for early product lifecycle, migration, ongoing lifecycle optimization, and end-of-life motions.
• Develop data-informed lifecycle recommendations that consider customer adoption, commercial health, revenue impact, market need, product usage, support burden, technical viability, and strategic fit.
• Lead cross-functional readiness for product lifecycle decisions, including aligning stakeholders, dependencies, communications, timelines, and execution plans.
• Create executive-ready recommendations that clearly summarize lifecycle status, risks, options, tradeoffs, customer impact, proposed actions, and the operational steps required to execute approved decisions.
• Support customer-centered transition and migration planning that protects customer trust and enables SAS to shift investment toward strategic growth areas.
• Maintain transparent lifecycle reporting, dashboards, decision frameworks, and stakeholder communication practices.
• Enable product teams with playbooks, templates, best practices, metrics, and repeatable processes for various stages of the product lifecycle.
• Embrace curiosity, passion, authenticity and accountability. These are our values and influence everything we do.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in product management, product operations, product lifecycle management, product marketing, program management, release management, or a related software business function.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives, build alignment through influence, and drive hands-on execution and accountability across teams.
• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative, technical, business, or analytical field such as Business Analytics, Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Economics, Finance, Statistics, or Data Science.
• Strong product judgment with the ability to balance customer needs, commercial outcomes, technical realities, and strategic priorities.
• Strong analytical capability with experience interpreting product, commercial, customer, operational, or financial data to identify trends, evaluate tradeoffs, and guide business decisions.
• Ability to synthesize ambiguous inputs into clear recommendations, metrics, reports, and decision-ready narratives.
• Strong communication skills, including executive-level communication, structured recommendations, stakeholder-facing updates, and practical operating guidance for product teams.
• Ability to design practical, repeatable processes that are understandable, implementable, and supported across the organization, with a focus on enabling consistent execution rather than advisory strategy alone.
• Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the above qualifications.

Additional competencies, knowledge and skills

• Experience with product lifecycle, product operations, product commercialization, or portfolio management in enterprise software.
• Experience with end-of-life, migration, legacy modernization, or product rationalization programs.
• Experience with SaaS business models, marketplace, partner, or channel strategies, pricing and packaging, or commercial readiness.
• Experience building dashboards, scorecards, or product health reporting.
• Experience with Jira, ServiceNow, product roadmapping tools, or enterprise reporting systems.
• PMP, Pragmatic, product operations, or related program/product management training.

World-class benefits

Highlights include...

• Comprehensive medical, prescription, dental and vision plans.
• Medical plan options include:
  • PPO with low annual deductible and copays.
  • HDHP combined with a health savings account with a contribution from SAS (no access to on-site health care center).
• Onsite Health Care Center (HQ) that’s free to employees and family members enrolled in the PPO plan. There's a pharmacy too! Not local to HQ? The pharmacy will ship prescriptions for no additional charge!
• An industry-leading 401k plan.
• Tuition Assistance Program and programs and resources to support your development
• Generous time away including vacation time, a variety of paid holidays, and our much-loved U.S. Winter Wellness Break between December 25 and January 1.
• Volunteer Time Off, parental leave and unlimited paid sick days.
• Generous childcare benefits for all full-time employees.

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