Product Readiness Manager

Meet the Team

Join the Business and Product Operations organization, where we focus on operational excellence, speed-to-market, and seamless product execution. We are a collaborative and highly analytical team dedicated to ensuring our product launches move from planning to market with clear ownership, visibility, and accountability. As a member of our team, you will work with innovators who value process efficiency, cross-functional partnership, and data-driven decision-making to scale our impact across the product portfolio.

Your Impact

As a Product Readiness Manager (PRM), you will lead cross-functional readiness for New Product introductions (NPI) and build scalable processes that improve execution across the portfolio. Your work ensures that launches are predictable, risks are managed, and partners remain aligned. By employing data, AI, and automation, you will drive operational maturity, reduce administrative effort, and provide a "single source of truth" for roadmaps and launch achievements. You will be a key advisor to collaborators, turning complex launch data into actionable insights that improve our ability to deliver outstanding products to our customers.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead readiness execution for Tier 1 and Tier 2 new product introductions from conception to launch.

• Manage stage gates, launch breakthroughs, dependencies, and go-to-market assets.

• Coordinate readiness across Product, Engineering, Pricing, Sales Enablement, Partner Enablement, Marketing, Legal, Compliance, and Customer Experience.

• Maintain readiness scorecards and RAID (Risks, Actions, Issues, and Decisions) tracking.

• Drive partner reviews, executive reporting, blocking issue, and conflict resolution.

• Standardize readiness processes, governance, templates, and operating cadences.

• Improve roadmap visibility and alignment through a unified source of truth.

• Use data, AI, and automation to reduce manual work, improve reporting accuracy, and increase release predictability.

• Enable product teams to consistently apply readiness standards.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Operations, or a related field (or 10+ years of equivalent professional experience).

• 8+ years of professional experience in product operations, product readiness, or strategic program management.

• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives within a large-scale, matrixed organization.

• Demonstrated experience managing project dependencies, risk mitigation, and partner communication.

• Proven ability to analyze complex data sets and produce executive-level reporting.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree or equivalent experience in Business Administration (MBA) or a related quantitative field.

• Experience leading go-to-market product readiness through product development methodologies and processes, including the Cisco Product Development Methodology (CPDM).

• Strong strategic demeanour with the ability to influence senior leaders without direct authority.

• Demonstrated experience using AI and data-driven tools to improve operational efficiency.

• Proven ability to quickly learn complex business domains and contribute to outcomes with minimal direction

Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.