Director, Product Strategy

Octus•New York, NY

5h•$130,000 - $175,000

About The Position

Octus is seeking a strategic, high-impact Director of Product Strategy to drive strategic product development and adoption of our internal workflow and data tools. You will be the bridge between technical architecture and business velocity, ensuring our internal systems are not just functional, but are competitive advantages that allow Octus to scale. You will be responsible for managing our roadmap and backlog, defining an ROI framework for our internal investments, aligning cross-functional leadership, and ensuring that every development hour spent is an intentional step toward measurable business impact and operational excellence.

Requirements

8+ Years of Experience: Proven track record in Product Management, Data Strategy, or User Research, specifically within complex B2B environments.
Domain Expertise: Deep familiarity with back-end infrastructure, data pipelines, and internal workflow tooling. Experience in financial information or publishing is a significant advantage.
The "Owner" Mentality: You don't wait for instructions when a project hits a snag. You own the solution and the communication strategy to keep stakeholders aligned.
Data Fluency: Ability to build ROI frameworks from scratch. You should be comfortable using data to tell a story and justify decision making.
Radical Curiosity: A natural drive to understand the "why" behind every request. You enjoy rolling up your sleeves to understand technical requirements while never losing sight of the long term strategy.
Communication & Relationship Building: Exceptional ability to translate technical and operational complexity into business value for executive leadership. You build deep, trust-based relationships across departments, practicing active listening to understand the pressures and pain points of your colleagues, ensuring they feel championed throughout the development lifecycle.

Nice To Haves

Experience in financial information or publishing is a significant advantage.

Responsibilities

Strategic Prioritization: Act as the ultimate architect and gatekeeper of the internal data tools roadmap. Develop and steward a logic-based prioritization framework that maximizes ROI and aligns with Octus’ long-term business objectives.
Systems Thinking: Evaluate how individual tool enhancements impact the broader data lifecycle and portfolio-wide workstreams. You can identify and clearly communicate how a change in upstream data ingestion impacts downstream data entry or client-facing delivery.
Insight Synthesis: Synthesize quantitative operational and usage data with qualitative stakeholder and customer insights to build a cohesive narrative for “why” we build what we build.
Cross-Functional Influence: Drive alignment across departments (Editorial, Data Operations, Technical Product Management) where you have influence but no direct authority.
Business Case Development: Design high-stakes business cases for data tooling and infrastructure investments, quantifying success through cost-savings, efficiency gains, or accelerated time-to-market.
Operational Excellence: Lead internal enablement and change management strategies to ensure high adoption of and proficiency in new tools and features.