Product Manager - Research and Development

The Pirates Why

The Pittsburgh Pirates are a storied franchise in Major League Baseball who are reinventing themselves on every level. Boldly and relentlessly pursuing excellence by:

• purposefully developing a player and people-centered culture;
• deeply connecting with our fans, partners, and colleagues;
• passionately creating lifetime memories for generations of families and friends; and
• meaningfully impacting our communities and the game of baseball.

At the Pirates, we believe in the power of a diverse workforce and strive to create an inclusive culture centered in Passion, Innovation, Respect, Accountability, Teamwork, Empathy, and Service.

Job Summary

The Pittsburgh Pirates are looking for a Product Manager to join Baseball R&D and help our teams identify and solve the most important problems for baseball decision-makers.

You will work on a cross-functional team with engineers, data scientists, analysts, biomechanists, and baseball experts. Many of our products are data- and model-driven, combining statistical or machine-learning models with software and workflows to improve decisions across areas such as player development, coaching, and Major League strategy.

You will have broad ownership and substantial autonomy to understand users, shape priorities, challenge assumptions, and help the team discover effective solutions.

Responsibilities:

1. Create clarity around what matters most. Work with R&D leadership and your team to define meaningful outcomes, establish priorities, and ensure the team understands what it should focus on and why.
2. Develop a deep understanding of our users and their problems. Learn how baseball decisions are made, understand the workflows and constraints surrounding them, and work with stakeholders to get to the root of the problem.
3. Help the team discover effective solutions. Partner with engineers, data scientists, analysts, baseball experts, and users to explore ideas, test assumptions, reduce uncertainty, and adapt as you learn. Solutions may involve software, analytical models, new data, changes to workflows, or some combination of these.
4. Keep important work moving. Protect the team’s focus on the highest-leverage problems and partner closely with Domain Leads, who bring technical and domain expertise, to make tradeoffs explicit, sequence work realistically, and intervene when high-priority work stalls or ownership is unclear.
5. Measure impact and learn from what we build. Use qualitative and quantitative evidence to understand whether our products are improving decisions and workflows, and use those insights to shape future priorities and direction.
6. Build alignment on process and philosophy. Work with other product managers in R&D to align on best practices for process and product management.

Qualifications:

We don't expect any candidate to have done all of these things. We're interested in people who can demonstrate several of these experiences or capabilities and who have the curiosity and ability to grow into the others:

1. Authorized to work lawfully in the United States.
2. Owned meaningful product problems end to end, from understanding the user need through discovery, prioritization, launch, and iteration.
3. Made difficult prioritization decisions when multiple valuable opportunities competed for limited time or resources.
4. Used discovery and evidence to change direction, drawing on user research, experiments, usage data, or other signals rather than simply executing an initial plan.
5. Worked closely with engineers, data scientists, or other technical experts on products where data, analytics, or models were a meaningful part of the solution. You do not need to build the models yourself, but you should be comfortable understanding their capabilities and limitations and helping turn them into useful products.
6. Operated with high agency and a hands-on approach, identifying important problems and finding practical ways to reduce uncertainty and move them forward.
7. Demonstrated a genuine interest in baseball and an ability to learn complex domains deeply. You do not need previous professional baseball experience, but you should be excited to learn how baseball decisions are made and have evidence that you can become fluent enough in an unfamiliar domain to make good product decisions within it.

Desired:

1. Building data, analytics, AI/ML, or decision-support products.
2. Working with expert users or in technically complex domains.
3. Working on a startup or small product team with broad ownership.
4. A demonstrated passion for sports technology and/or sports analytics.
5. Experience with rapid prototyping, software development, SQL, and/or cloud technologies.
6. Working in agile development environments.

Equal Opportunity Employer

The Pittsburgh Pirates are an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.