Technical Product Manager , Fight Friction

Be yourself at Protolabs Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification.  We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to building a diverse team that feels they are valued in the workplace.  So do you feel you do not meet every single requirement but still intrigued? We encourage you to still apply!  You can help make our company even better.  We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, age, mental or physical ability, or any way you represent yourself.  We strongly believe diversity makes for more successful teams.

Why Protolabs? We are the leaders in digital manufacturing. We hire doers, makers, and creative thinkers who tackle our roles with an entrepreneurial spirit. Our culture is centered around meaningful work that brings new and innovative products to market at unprecedented speeds. We are a diverse team that comes from all walks of life and take pride in our team who is smart, genuine, humble, and passionate about what we do. It’s our people who fuel our creativity and make our culture feel like home.

Join our team as a Technical Product Manager, Fight Friction! This is a fixed hybrid role (M/F remote; Tues-Thurs onsite) at HQ in Maple Plain, MN.

Own and maintain the product roadmap for the assigned ecosystem area, balancing new capability development against friction-reduction and quality-of-experience work

Translate business and customer needs into clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria for the engineering team

Prioritize the backlog using a consistent framework, balancing engineering capacity, customer/business impact, and cross-functional input

Partner with engineering leads on release planning, scope trade-offs, and delivery timelines; coordinate launch and rollout activities

Define and track success metrics for shipped work, including adoption, quality, and friction-reduction indicators

Partner directly with Sales and Customer Success to systematically surface friction points across the ecosystem — including lost or stalled deals, recurring support escalations, churn signals, and workaround patterns — and translate them into a prioritized, actionable backlog

Act as the coordination point between engineering, Sales, and Customer Success so that friction-related fixes move through hand-offs cleanly rather than stalling between teams, despite having no direct authority over those teams

Establish and run a recurring intake and feedback loop (e.g., regular syncs, a shared submission process, or office hours) so Sales and Customer Success have a known, reliable channel for raising friction issues rather than relying on ad hoc escalation

Report on friction-reduction progress using concrete before/after metrics (e.g., ticket volume, time-to-resolution, deal-blocking issues resolved, repeat-escalation rate), and communicate that progress back to Sales, Customer Success, and engineering leadership

Facilitate trade-off conversations when friction-reduction priorities compete with other roadmap commitments, ensuring decisions and rationale are visible to all stakeholders

Represent the voice of the customer and front-line teams in engineering planning and prioritization discussions

Identify opportunities for continuous improvement in how the team identifies, triages, and resolves ecosystem friction.

A degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

4+ years' experience in technical product management, ideally supporting a software engineering team

Experience working directly with Sales and/or Customer Success teams, ideally in a cross-functional, platform, or ecosystem-facing role

Experience coordinating delivery across multiple teams without direct authority over those teams

Preferred Qualifications

Prior experience in a platform, ecosystem, or internal-tools product role spanning multiple customer-facing teams

Experience building or running a formal intake/feedback process between product and go-to-market teams

Exposure to complex operational environments where technology, people and process all need to work together

Product & analytical skills 

Comfortable working with funnels, experiments and cost/benefit framing to support decisions

Ability to define clear success metrics and measure product performance against business outcomes and KPIs

User-centric mindset with the ability to balance customer, business and operational considerations

Collaboration & communication

Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Able to create clarity in complex domains and build alignment without direct authority

Pragmatic, decisive and impact-oriented: you focus on outcomes over outputs

We offer a competitive salary and total rewards package

We offer amazing benefits including but not limited to:

Health Insurance: Traditional OR High Deductible plan

Flexible Spending Accounts

Health Savings Account (including employer contributions)

Dental and Vision

Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance

Short-Term and Long-Term Disability

Paid caregiver leave

You will receive at least 3 weeks of PTO + Wellness + Holiday Pay + Volunteer Hours

401k with company match and immediate vest

Employee Stock Purchase Program at a discounted rate

Matching grants through Protolabs foundation

And More!

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