Product Manager, Senior

Role purpose

TraceLink is seeking a Senior Product Manager to define and scale reusable canonical transaction models for multi-enterprise value chains. The role converts complex business workflows and heterogeneous partner messages into standards-aligned, implementation-ready product specifications that can be reused across industries, customers, partners, applications, and integration technologies.

This person will operate at the intersection of product management, multi-enterprise business processes, B2B standards, enterprise applications, and data modeling. Success requires more than gathering requirements: the role must determine the business meaning of a transaction, reconcile industry standards and customer variants, define a durable canonical model, and guide that model through subtype design, transforms, user experience, testing, release, adoption, and lifecycle governance. The resulting models must work across Life Sciences, Pharmaceuticals, Logistics, Medical devices, Healthcare, Food and Beverage, Industrial Manufacturing, Automotive, Consumer Goods, Retail, and other partner-intensive industries.

What you will own

• A portfolio of canonical transactions across order management, procurement, planning, manufacturing, inventory, warehousing, logistics, transportation, customs, finance, master data, and operational messaging.
• Research the end-to-end business process, including how a transaction is generated and triggered, sender and receiver roles, expected response, exception paths, regulatory implications, and system-of-record behavior for each transaction.
• Normalize equivalent business concepts across such global data standards as JSon and XML, ANSI X12, SAP IDoc, UN/EDIFACT and EANCOM, GS1, ODETTE and VDA, UBL and Peppol, and a variety of ERP system APIs while preserving source-specific semantics, version differences, qualifiers, and implementation constraints.
• Define canonical object structures, reusable components, identifiers, references, parties, locations, dates, quantities, amounts, statuses, code lists, conditions, loops, cardinality, and validation rules.
• Design canonical schema data structures for reuse across partner roles such as buyers, suppliers, manufacturers, contract manufacturers, distributors, warehouses, 3PLs and 4PLs, carriers, automotive OEMs and tier suppliers, retailers, marketplaces, dealers, service providers, customs participants, and regulatory stakeholders.
• Produce canonical designs and documentation, field-level mapping specifications, business rules, sample JSON and XML payloads, subtype requirements, picklists or enumerations, and transformation acceptance criteria.
• Create detailed specifications for transformations between global data standards and TraceLink canonical structures for both inbound and outbound interfaces across a complete range of transactions and business processes, including formats for standard LinkActions that drive connectivity to major ERP systems, reference-data conversion, test data, system reconciliation, and error handling.
• Perform gap analysis against customer and industry implementation guidelines, sample messages, ERP, WMS, TMS, OMS, MES, and commerce-platform structures, and existing TraceLink canonicals; distinguish true canonical gaps from mapping, configuration, reference-data, or source-data issues.
• Partner with Architecture and Engineering on schema design tradeoffs, extensibility, backward compatibility, versioning, performance, UI depth constraints, and migration strategy.
• Create, groom, and prioritize system documentation in Epics and Stories. Define acceptance criteria; review implementations; support QA automation and regression testing with representative customer files, and release readiness.
• Govern the transaction lifecycle by assessing enhancement requests, preventing customer-specific overfitting, maintaining compatibility, standardizing code lists, and measuring reuse, adoption, defects, and delivery speed.
• Serve as the product expert for customers and internal teams, supporting discovery, design reviews, implementation decisions, demos, enablement, and roadmap prioritization.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of product management, business analysis, solution architecture, integration consulting, or standards implementation experience in multi-enterprise supply chains, B2B integration, ERP, WMS, TMS, OMS, MES, commerce, or manufacturing platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to model complex business transactions and translate process semantics into structured schemas, mappings, validation rules, and testable requirements.
• Working knowledge of at least two enterprise B2B formats or integration ecosystems, such as JSon and XML, ANSI X12, SAP IDoc, UN/EDIFACT, EANCOM, GS1, cXML, OAGIS, ODETTE and VDA, UBL and Peppol, APIs, or ERP-native business objects.
• Strong understanding of multi-enterprise flows across master data, forecasts, orders, schedules, manufacturing, inventory, warehousing, fulfillment, shipping, receiving, transportation, invoicing, settlement, traceability, and exception handling.
• Ability to read implementation guidelines and sample payloads at segment, element, qualifier, loop, and cardinality level and explain their business meaning to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Experience working with Architecture, Engineering, UX, QA, Services, and customer-facing teams through discovery, specification, delivery, validation, and release.
• Strong analytical judgment: can separate a reusable product requirement from customer-specific configuration and make explicit tradeoffs around scope, compatibility, and time to market.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including concise product requirements, design reviews, customer workshops, executive updates, and enablement content.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in one or more partner-intensive industries such as Life Sciences, Pharmaceuticals, Logistics, Medical devices, Healthcare, Food and Beverage, Industrial Manufacturing, Automotive, Consumer Goods, Retail, and other partner-intensive or regulated industries.
• Exposure to such cross-industry concerns as traceability, product and location identification, quality, customs, sustainability, cold chain, recalls, or regulatory compliance is valuable.
• Hands-on familiarity with enterprise processes such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, forecast-to-fulfill, plan-to-produce, inventory and warehouse management, transportation, product information, and financial settlement.
• Experience with SAP or other ERP, WMS, TMS, OMS, MES, PIM, marketplace, or commerce platforms is valuable.
• Experience designing canonical or common data models, API resources, event schemas, master-data structures, reference-data management, or schema governance.
• Experience with transformation development and practices using such integration tools as Contivo, IBM Sterling Integrator, SAP Integration Suite, bizTalk and others, including creating mapping specifications and code-list conversions, test harnesses, automated regression, and exception reconciliation.
• Understanding of multi-tenant SaaS, metadata-driven applications, configurable business objects, extensibility, release management, and backward-compatible schema evolution.
• Familiarity with analytics, reports, dashboards, AI assistants or agents, and the data quality and explainability needed to make transactional data usable for decisions and automation.
• Coding experience in any programming language in an enterprise environment is a desirable bonus.

How success will be measured

• Canonicals accurately represent the business process and support targeted industries, standards, partner roles, regions, and implementation patterns.
• New customer or partner mappings reuse standard canonical structures and code lists with minimal one-off extensions.
• Transaction research, canonical specifications, sample payloads, and acceptance criteria are complete enough for Engineering and QA to implement without repeated interpretation.
• Canonical and subtype defects, escaped mapping gaps, and backward-compatibility issues decline release over release. Time to research, design, build, validate, and deploy a new transaction or standard LinkAction improves measurably.
• Internal and customer teams can understand, demonstrate, implement, and extend the transaction portfolio with confidence.

What strong candidates demonstrate

During interviews, strong candidates should be able to work through a realistic transaction rather than rely only on general product-management language. A practical case may ask the candidate to:

• Explain the business purpose and choreography of a transaction, including initiator, responder, system of record, acknowledgements, and exception paths.
• Compare the same business concept across an X12 message, an EDIFACT message, and an SAP IDoc or API, identifying semantic mismatches rather than performing a superficial field match.
• Propose a canonical structure with reusable components, identifiers, references, quantities, statuses, enumerations, conditions, and extension points.
• Assess a customer sample against an existing canonical and classify gaps as product, mapping, reference-data, configuration, or source-data concerns.
• Define validation rules, representative test scenarios, backward-compatibility considerations, and success measures.