Principal Product Manager (Observability, Logs & Traces)

Role overview

Workday is seeking a Principal Product Manager (Observability, Logs & Traces) to lead its observability platform. You will own the product vision and strategy across the full observability data lifecycle—from collection through processing, querying, and visualization—and coordinate delivery across multiple scrum teams.

Responsibilities

• Drive product vision, strategy, and roadmap for observability (data collection, processing, querying, and visualization).
• Partner with platform engineers, SRE, and operations to understand observability needs, monitoring requirements, troubleshooting workflows, and visibility gaps.
• Coordinate and align delivery across multiple scrum teams in a complex distributed systems environment.
• Shape solution design and drive cross-team delivery with clear expectations and transparency.
• Champion adoption of observability tooling across Workday’s development organization.
• Represent the platform to engineering leadership and the broader technical community.
• Use quantitative evidence to prioritize and measure impact, including adoption metrics, query performance, system health indicators, and cost analysis.

Requirements

• 12+ years of product management experience delivering SaaS/cloud infrastructure, platform, or developer tooling at scale.
• Proven ability to define and execute research strategies (user interviews, dogfooding, internal surveys, usage analysis) to validate product direction.
• Strong influence and communication skills; able to drive alignment with senior engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders without authority.
• Quantitative product decision-making: adoption, performance, health indicators, and cost analysis.
• Experience delivering complex initiatives across platform engineering, SRE, infrastructure, and application development teams.
• Experience owning data pipeline products in areas such as collection, processing, storage, querying, or visualization of high-volume operational data.
• Strategic mindset linking observability investments to business outcomes (incident reduction, developer productivity, operational excellence).
• Deep understanding of observability/monitoring landscape, including Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch and relevant industry trends.
• Deep observability knowledge: metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and SLOs.
• Customer empathy for internal developer and operator personas; translate pain points from support data and usage analytics into product strategy.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field; Master’s or equivalent practical experience preferred.

Nice to have

• Not explicitly stated.