
Principal Product Manager, Platform
Job Description
About the Role
At Fortune Media, we are reinventing how a storied brand adapts to today's digital-first world. The Product team works across Fortune's digital properties (editorial, conferences, affiliate, partnerships, and more) to launch new products and optimize existing ones.
Fortune Media is seeking a Principal Product Manager, Platform to own the infrastructure that powers Fortune’s consumer experience. This is a senior individual contributor role with full domain ownership: no co-pilot, no manager making the hard calls. You are the strategic container for Platform: the person engineering, data, and cross-functional partners seek out when a problem is too technically complex, too ambiguous, or too high-stakes to resolve without deep expertise. You will drive the stability, speed, and testing capabilities that underpin everything we publish and every experience we deliver to our audience.
This role reports to the Sr. Director of Product Management, Growth & Platform and is a high-visibility position with significant ownership over Fortune's core platform health.
What You'll Own
Site Performance & Core Web Vitals
- Define and drive Fortune's performance strategy across LCP, CLS, INP, TTI, and overall page speed across web and mobile web
- Partner with Engineering to identify, prioritize, and ship performance optimizations that improve both user experience and SEO outcomes
- Own performance KPIs and hold the bar on regressions, working proactively to prevent them before they reach production
Platform Stability & Reliability
- Own the roadmap for platform health: uptime, error rates, deployment reliability, and incident response workflows
- Work closely with Engineering to triage issues, define severity frameworks, and establish standards for production readiness
- Translate platform risk into business impact, and vice versa, so engineering and leadership are always aligned on priorities
Testing Infrastructure & Experimentation
- Own Fortune's A/B testing and experimentation platform (currently Optimizely), ensuring it's reliable, well-documented, and used effectively across teams
- Partner with Growth, Editorial, and Analytics to define a rigorous experimentation framework: hypothesis design, statistical validity, result interpretation
- Drive adoption of testing best practices across the product and editorial org
CMS & Publishing Tools
- Serve as the primary PM for Fortune's CMS and publishing infrastructure, partnering with Editorial to understand workflow needs and shipping improvements that remove friction
- Ensure editorial tooling is stable, performant, and keeps pace with how Fortune's content teams work
- Identify opportunities to modernize the publishing stack in ways that enable new content formats and editorial capabilities
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Collaborate with Engineering, Design, Editorial, and Data to define and deliver platform improvements with measurable impact
- Write clear, detailed PRDs and technical requirements; work closely with engineers on architecture decisions and trade-offs
- Proactively identify and inform stakeholders impacted by front-end or back-end platform changes (Editorial, Ads, Revenue, and others) before changes ship, not after. You own the communication surface, not just the delivery
- Communicate platform strategy, roadmap, and results to senior leadership in terms that connect technical work to business outcomes
Required Skills
- Technical depth: you have an engineering background or equivalent hands-on technical experience; you understand how systems are built and can have substantive conversations with engineers about architecture, trade-offs, and implementation
- Platform and performance expertise: you have a strong grasp of web performance concepts (Core Web Vitals, rendering pipelines, caching strategies) and how they translate to user and business outcomes
- Experimentation fluency: you understand A/B testing methodology at a statistical and operational level, not just conceptually
- Strong written communication: you write clear PRDs, detailed specs, and crisp documentation; ambiguity stops with you
- Stakeholder management: you can translate complex technical realities into business language for non-technical audiences and hold the line on platform investments in a roadmap conversation
- Analytical and data-driven: you use data to diagnose problems, measure impact, and drive decisions; you're comfortable in analytics platforms and know how to build the right dashboards
- Scrappy and resourceful: you figure things out, you don't wait for perfect conditions
- Proficiency with Jira, Confluence, Looker, and Google Analytics
- 7+ years of product management experience, with substantial ownership of platform, infrastructure, or technical products at a senior IC level
Bonus Skills
- AI-forward approach: you use AI tools to move faster and think sharper, whether that's drafting specs, analyzing data, or generating options. This is a plus; curiosity and willingness to develop it is table stakes
- Experience in media, publishing, or content-driven businesses
- Familiarity with CMS platforms and editorial workflows
- Experience with Optimizely or comparable A/B testing platforms
- Understanding of SEO and how platform decisions affect search visibility
- Understanding of Consent Management and how platform decisions affect compliance
- Experience with observability tooling (DataDog, New Relic, or similar)
What Success Looks Like
We're looking for someone who hits the ground running, not someone who needs six months to find their footing. You bring enough platform and infrastructure knowledge to orient yourself quickly, ask the right questions, and start making decisions without being led to them.
Within the first 30 days, you will have:
- Embedded with the Platform engineering team and established yourself as their primary PM partner. The engineering team is coming to you first, not escalating up.
- Completed a self-directed audit of platform performance, stability, and experimentation infrastructure, and formed a clear point of view on the biggest gaps
- Started reducing the decision load on your manager. You're fielding platform questions, triaging issues, and moving things forward independently
Within the first 3 months, you will have:
- Owned and shipped at least one meaningful platform improvement with measurable impact, without waiting to be told what to prioritize
- Developed a strategic roadmap for Platform that you can fully defend. You identified the systemic gaps, made the structural calls, and brought leadership in only where resources or company strategy were at stake.
- Established KPIs, a reporting cadence, and an experimentation framework for platform health. Leadership is informed, engineers have clear quality standards, and the measurement infrastructure supports the team’s velocity.
- Made it demonstrably easier for your manager to focus elsewhere. Platform is in good hands.
Salary: $165,000 to $180,000. This range is a good-faith estimate and may ultimately vary based on a number of relevant factors.
Location: New York, NY
A Few Of Fortune’s Perks And Benefits
20 vacation days and 2 personal days on top of 11 company holidays and an honor-based sick leave policy
Health, dental, and vision coverage (90% paid for individuals and families), along with flexible spending accounts where Fortune contributes to your HSA
401(k) plan
Generous parental leave
Dependent care, commuter, and cell phone benefits
Tuition reimbursement program
A commitment to an open, inclusive, and diverse work culture
About Fortune Media
Fortune is a global media organization renowned for iconic franchises including the Fortune 500, Fortune Global 500, and the Most Powerful Women Summit. Our technology team is a small, strategic group driving digital transformation across an organization that spans editorial, enterprise media sales, consumer subscriptions, and live events. This is an opportunity to make an outsized impact at one of the world's most recognized media brands.