Principal Product Manager, Energy
NRG Energy · Seattle · $162,000–$240,000 (stated in the posting)
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The Principal Product Manager, Energy, will act as the cross-portfolio product owner for smart home energy within the Vivint ecosystem. This is a senior individual contributor role for a product professional who can connect in-home energy features, grid programs, partner integrations, and customer offers into one coherent plan. You will take defined business objectives and translate them into a prioritized roadmap and clear decisions, working alongside the product leads who own the core of the energy portfolio.
Primary Responsibilities:
Customer Insights & Energy Strategy
- Customer Empathy: Develop a deep understanding of how, when, and why customers engage with energy features, and where comfort, savings, and trust are won or lost.
- Data-Driven Direction: Use telemetry, program performance data, and customer research to track adoption, diagnose friction, and prioritize investment.
- Portfolio Strategy: Own the multi-year energy product direction and translate it into a roadmap that spans in-home features, grid programs, devices, and offers.
Roadmap Ownership & Cross-Portfolio Delivery
- Roadmap Execution: Define, prioritize, and drive the energy roadmap, translating strategy into clear, executable requirements and making sequencing tradeoffs explicit.
- In-Home to Grid Integration: Own the product definition that connects personalized, AI-driven home energy optimization to demand response, virtual power plant, and utility programs, including how results are measured and verified.
- Ecosystem Alignment: Ensure energy capabilities align with Vivint's platform architecture and design language, avoiding siloed features.
Technical Authorship & Matrixed Execution
- Requirements Definition: Author crisp product requirement documents, specs, and business briefs that turn customer and program needs into precise requirements for engineering and data science teams.
- Program Health Mechanisms: Establish and monitor success metrics and dashboards for adoption, savings, engagement, and program participation.
- Customer Terms & Experience: Partner with legal and customer experience teams on the terms, consent, and opt-out design that allow energy programs to be delivered responsibly.
Partnerships & Offers
- Partner & Platform Integrations: Lead the product side of relationships with device makers, integration platforms, and utility partners, working with partnerships and legal where product and commercial terms are connected.
- Energy Offers: Partner with NRG and Vivint commercial teams on energy-related offers, bundles, and pricing concepts.
Cross-Functional Influence
- Product Leadership Collaboration: Partner closely with the Smart Comfort product lead (in-home energy experience) and the VPP / demand response product lead (grid programs and partner integrations). You will not take over their backlogs; you will own the decisions between and above them, set shared priorities, and resolve tradeoffs.
- Stakeholder Communication: Maintain alignment across engineering, UX, data science, legal, and commercial partners, and escalate core tradeoffs and timeline risks to senior product leadership with clear recommendations.
Required Skills & Functional Dimensions:
- Execution Amid Ambiguity: Proven ability to take broad goals and independently establish a structured execution path, maintaining steady progress as constraints and partner conditions shift.
- Analytical Rigor: Strong proficiency with data analytics tools to evaluate product and program health, understand customer behavior, and justify prioritization with clear metrics.
- Energy Domain Knowledge: Working knowledge of demand response, virtual power plants, distributed energy resources, smart thermostats, or connected-home products, and how a grid program turns a device into valuable capacity.
- Technical Foundations: Sound understanding of software development lifecycles, API and platform integrations, and the hardware and firmware constraints of connected IoT consumer experiences.
- Partner & Commercial Fluency: Experience leading relationships where product decisions and commercial terms are intertwined.
- Clear Professional Communication: Ability to synthesize complex technical and commercial information into concise, scannable updates for engineering peers and senior leadership.
Required Education & Experience:
- Experience: [8+] years of technical product management experience, including a track record of shipping consumer-facing software, IoT, or connected hardware products and leading strategy across multiple teams.
- Data Sourcing Track Record: Direct experience using product analytics platforms or working alongside data engineering teams to track, verify, and improve customer experiences.
- Preferred Experience: Wholesale electricity markets, utility programs, or retail energy providers; customer consent and opt-out design for connected-device control; businesses that sell devices, subscriptions, and services together.
- Education: B.S. or M.S. in a technical field preferred (Computer Science, Electrical/Mechanical Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline); equivalent practical product management experience considered.
Job Functions:
Position requires in-office presence in Seattle, WA on a hybrid schedule for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday with a work from home day on Friday. The position will start remote and then will move into the hybrid schedule.
The base salary range for this position is: $162,000- $240,000* *The base salary range above represents the low and high end of the salary range for this position. Actual salaries will vary based on several factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of the total compensation package for employees. Other rewards may include annual bonus, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards. In addition the position may be eligible to participate in the benefits program which include, but are not limited to, medical, vision, dental, 401K, and flexible spending accounts.
NRG Energy is committed to a drug and alcohol-free workplace. To the extent permitted by law and any applicable collective bargaining agreement, employees are subject to periodic random drug testing, and post-accident and reasonable suspicion drug and alcohol testing. EOE AA M/F/Protected Veteran Status/Disability. Level, Title and/or Salary may be adjusted based on the applicant's experience or skills.
EEO is the Law Poster (The poster can be found at http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/upload/poster_screen_reader_optimized.pdf)
Official description on file with Talent.