Product Manager - AIDLC

Job Purpose:

As a valued member of the Product Management Team, the Product Manager works alongside other product owners, internal stakeholders, customers, and AI-augmented teammates to determine priorities, shape outcomes, and deliver high-impact products. This role maintains the product backlog and owns the Product Roadmap for their respective products, partnering with engineering, design, GTM, and customers across the full AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AIDLC).

The Product Manager is ultimately accountable for ensuring the right product is delivered to our customers on time and aligned with strategic objectives. They are expected to operate as a confident, AI-fluent practitioner, using modern AI tooling (Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and other approved platforms) to accelerate discovery, design, decision-making, and delivery, while applying strong project management discipline across cross-functional teams.

Job Responsibilities:

Product Strategy & Backlog Ownership

• Prioritizes the product backlog and coordinates with stakeholders, including other Product Owners, the market, executives, customers, and the team, to deliver maximum value and quality. Works with peer Product Owners to ensure cross-team dependencies are sequenced and managed appropriately.
• Creates and manages a detailed backlog of epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria; actively participates in sprint planning, backlog refinement, and release ceremonies.
• Continuously prioritizes incoming business and customer requests, using both quantitative signals (usage data, revenue impact, support volume) and qualitative input (customer interviews, advisory boards) to plan releases that maximize organizational value.
  Serves as the subject matter expert for assigned product domains, maintaining deep, current knowledge of customer workflows, competitive offerings, and industry trends.
• Develops a clear understanding of the target market and user personas and uses this insight to guide product decisions and roadmap trade-offs.
• Defines epics, features, and user stories for all new functionality. Partners with stakeholders to scope Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) that deliver incremental value and align with strategic goals.
• Works with Scrum teams and other Product Owners on release planning; inspects, accepts, or rejects completed work from the development cycle; communicates work in progress and upcoming work to key stakeholders.
• Assesses competitive positioning by systematically comparing Cendyn’s products to competitor offerings and translating findings into roadmap and positioning recommendations.

AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AIDLC) Execution

• Operates fluently across all phases of the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AIDLC), including discovery, definition, design, build, validate, release, and learn, using AI tools to compress cycle time and improve decision quality at every stage.
• Applies AIDLC practices to translate ambiguous customer needs into structured, testable artifacts: problem statements, opportunity briefs, BVPs, PRDs, acceptance criteria, and release notes.
• Uses AI-assisted research and synthesis to accelerate discovery (interview synthesis, win/loss analysis, competitive teardowns, market scans) while maintaining human judgment on strategic decisions.
• Partners with engineering on AI-assisted build practices (spec-driven development, AI-generated scaffolding, automated test generation) and ensures product requirements are written in a form that both humans and AI coding assistants can act on reliably.
• Champions responsible AI practices: validates AI-generated outputs, flags hallucination risk, ensures customer data is handled in compliance with privacy and security policies, and documents how AI was used in any artifact that influences a decision or shipped product.
• Continuously refines personal and team AIDLC workflows, sharing patterns and prompts that improve quality and velocity across the product organization.

AI Tooling & Productivity

• Uses Claude (Anthropic) as a primary thinking partner for product discovery, requirements drafting, competitive analysis, customer-interview synthesis, edge-case generation, PRD review, and stakeholder communication.
• Uses Microsoft 365 Copilot across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Loop to accelerate meeting prep, summarization, document drafting, and data analysis.
• Leverages additional AI and automation tools as appropriate to the role, which may include: ChatGPT or other LLM assistants for ideation and drafting; Notion AI or Confluence AI for knowledge management; Jira AI / Atlassian Intelligence for backlog refinement and reporting; Figma AI for design exploration and review; Gong, Chorus, or similar conversational-intelligence tools for customer-call analysis; product-analytics platforms (e.g., Pendo, Amplitude, Mixpanel) with AI-assisted insight generation; and approved internal AI agents and skills.
• Demonstrates strong prompt-craft and context-engineering skills, knowing when to use which tool, how to structure inputs, how to verify outputs, and how to combine tools into reliable workflows.
• Maintains a healthy skepticism of AI output: validates facts, checks sources, and never ships customer-facing or decision-grade content without human review.

Project & Program Management

• Applies disciplined project management practices to drive initiatives from concept to launch: scope definition, milestone planning, dependency mapping, risk identification and mitigation, status reporting, and stakeholder communication.
• Builds and maintains realistic project plans that account for engineering capacity, cross-team dependencies, compliance reviews, GTM readiness, and customer commitments.
• Identifies and surfaces risks, blockers, and trade-offs early; proposes options with clear pros, cons, and recommendations rather than escalating problems without analysis.
• Runs effective working sessions with agendas, captured decisions, assigned owners, and due dates, and follows through to closure.
• Tracks key delivery metrics (cycle time, predictability, scope change, defect rates, time-to-value) and uses them to improve team performance over time.
• Coordinates cross-functional launches with Engineering, Design, QA, Support, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, ensuring all functions are prepared for general availability.

Requirements:

Required Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 3+ years of relevant Product Management, Business Analyst, or Product Coordinator experience in an Agile software product development environment.
• Hands-on experience with Agile backlog management tools such as Jira (preferred), Confluence, Azure DevOps, Target Process, or VersionOne.
• Demonstrated experience collaborating with UX/Design resources on wireframes, mockups, and prototypes using tools such as Figma (preferred), Axure, Balsamiq, or Visio.
• Working proficiency with at least one general-purpose AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or equivalent) and Microsoft 365 Copilot in a professional setting, including the ability to write effective prompts, verify outputs, and integrate AI into day-to-day product work.
• Demonstrated project management skills: planning, scheduling, risk management, stakeholder communication, and delivery accountability across cross-functional teams.

Preferred Education and Experience

• MBA preferred.
• Formal project management training or certification (PMP, PRINCE2, PMI-ACP, CSPO, SAFe POPM, or equivalent).
• Prior experience in hospitality, travel, SaaS, or enterprise B2B software.
• Experience working within an AIDLC, AI-augmented engineering, or AI-product environment, including familiarity with concepts such as spec-driven development, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agents, and evaluation frameworks.
• Experience with product analytics (Pendo, Amplitude, Mixpanel), data visualization (Power BI, Tableau, Looker), and SQL-level data exploration.

Expected Competencies

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write concisely and clearly for engineering, executive, customer, and GTM audiences.
• Strong analytical and structured-thinking skills; able to decompose ambiguous problems and frame trade-offs.
• AI fluency — confident, responsible, and effective use of modern AI tools as part of daily product work.
• Customer empathy and a relentless focus on outcomes over outputs.
• Bias for action, ownership mindset, and comfort operating with ambiguity.
• Collaborative, low-ego working style with the ability to influence without authority.

Work Timings:

Monday through Friday from 12 PM to 9 PM IST to provide healthy overlap between India team and US team and supporting both to ensure adequate collaboration. This role will be working in Hybrid Mode and will require at least 2 days’ work from office at Hyderabad.

EEO Statement

Cendyn provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, Cendyn complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Cendyn expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of Cendyn’s employees to perform their job duties may result in discipline up to and including discharge.

Other Duties

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.