Sr Director Product Management
Ceridian
About the Opportunity
Payroll is the heart of the Dayforce platform: it is where accuracy, compliance, and trust are earned every pay cycle for millions of employees. We are looking for a Senior Director, Product Management, Payroll to own the strategy and outcomes for this business and lead the team that delivers it.
This is a player-coach role. You will build, develop, and grow a team of product managers while staying close to the work yourself: shaping strategy, driving prioritization, engaging customers, and driving execution with Engineering and Design. You will set the strategic direction for payroll, using AI as a lever both in the product and in how we work as a product team.
What You'll Get To Do
People leadership
- Lead, coach, and develop a team of product managers; build a culture of ownership, curiosity, and high standards.
- Set clear goals, give direct feedback, and create growth paths so team members advance in their careers.
- Raise product craft across the team, including discovery, requirements, and rapid prototyping and analysis.
Strategy and vision
- Own the multi-year vision, strategy, and roadmap for Dayforce Payroll, grounded in market insight, competitive analysis, and customer outcomes.
- Define where AI changes how payroll gets done, from pay preparation through validation and issue resolution, and ground it in measurable customer outcomes.
- Make clear, data-backed investment and prioritization decisions, and explain the why to teams and executives.
Execution
- Stay hands-on: show what good looks like in strategy, discovery, and customer work, lean in on the highest-stakes initiatives, and unblock delivery.
- Partner closely with Engineering and Design to ship high-quality releases on schedule.
- Own the payroll product backlog and release plans at a portfolio level, balancing compliance, innovation, and technical health.
Customers and go-to-market
- Engage directly and regularly with customers, from executive sponsors to payroll practitioners, through advisory boards, roadmap sessions, and site visits.
- Lead product response to customer escalations: diagnose root cause, commit to a plan, and communicate it with transparency.
- Partner with Sales, Services, Support, Product Marketing, and Partners on deal support, launches, enablement, and implementation success.
- Represent Dayforce Payroll with industry analysts and at customer and industry events.
Metrics and outcomes
- Define and own business and product metrics: adoption, retention, attach and revenue impact, payroll accuracy, processing time, support case volume, and customer satisfaction.
- Use data to measure outcomes, report progress to leadership, and course-correct quickly.
Skills and Experience We Value
- 10+ years in product management, including 5+ years leading product managers, with experience managing other people leaders.
- Proven player-coach: you have built and developed high-performing teams while personally owning strategy and delivery.
- Track record of setting product strategy for a complex, mission-critical product and turning it into shipped outcomes.
- Proven track record bringing AI to market in enterprise products: identifying high-value use cases, shipping them, and scaling them with measurable customer impact.
- AI-fluent in your own work: you use AI every day for research, analysis, prototyping, and decision-making, and you raise the bar for how your team works with it.
- Strong metrics orientation: you define success measures up front and manage to business and product outcomes, not output.
- Experience working directly with enterprise customers, including leading through escalations with executive stakeholders.
- Skilled cross-functional leader who builds trust with Sales, Services, Support, Engineering, and Marketing.
- Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable presenting to executives, customers, and industry analysts.
- Enterprise B2B SaaS experience, ideally in HCM, ERP, or fintech, building products where accuracy and regulatory change shape the roadmap; payroll or tax domain knowledge is a strong plus.
- Experience leading distributed, global teams.