Senior Director, Product Management

Choice Hotels is evolving how we build, deliver, and scale solutions through a shift to a Product Operating Model (POM), a company-wide transformation focused on delivering real customer and business outcomes.   

We are building cross-functional product teams empowered to drive outcomes for our guests, franchisees, owners, and associates — and we're looking for talented product professionals who are passionate at solving meaningful problems end-to-end. This transformation represents a unique opportunity to help shape how one of the world's leading lodging franchisors innovates and grows.  

As we stand up and scale these teams, we anticipate opening a variety of Product Management roles across multiple domains. If you're energized by solving complex problems, we encourage you to #MakeItYourChoice by submitting your application to our talent pipeline to be considered as roles become available.   

Upcoming Opportunity – Senior Director, Product Management   

The Senior Director, Product Management is a senior product leadership role with accountability for the health, direction, and outcomes of a highly complex product portfolio spanning multiple functions or a critical domain at the core of the business. This isn't a role where you lead one team or one set of problems. You're responsible for the architecture of an entire product capability — the strategy, the leadership, the operating model, and the results. 

Your job is to lead the leaders. You'll manage Directors and Senior Managers who run their own product teams, and you'll hold yourself accountable for what those teams build, how well they operate, and the business outcomes they generate. That means you need to be exceptional at developing product leaders — not just product managers — and at creating the conditions across a wide portfolio where strong, disciplined product work can happen at scale. 

You'll define the multi-year product direction for your portfolio, making hard decisions about where to invest, what to stop, and how to sequence complex interdependencies across teams, budgets, and business priorities. Success here is measured by the quality of the leaders you develop, the clarity and durability of the strategy your organization executes, and whether the portfolio moves the business in the right direction — not just this quarter, but over the next one to three years. 

What You'll Do 

Define and own the product strategy for a highly

complex portfolio. This isn't short-cycle roadmap planning. You're setting the direction across multiple teams and product areas, identifying the most important problems the business needs to solve over a multi-year horizon, and making deliberate, well-reasoned bets. Clarity at this level is rare and hard. Your job is to provide it. 

Translate company objectives into portfolio strategy. Work from the top down and the bottom up simultaneously. Understand where the company needs to go, make sense of it across competing priorities and resource constraints, and ensure every team in your organization is pulling in the right direction with a clear understanding of why. 

Lead and develop Directors and Senior Managers. Real leadership development — not roadmap reviews and status reports. Diagnose the capability gaps in your leaders, build targeted interventions, and measure growth. If a Director on your team is struggling to develop their own PMs, that's your problem to solve first. 

Build product leadership capability, not product leadership dependency. Your leaders should be making the most important decisions in their product areas without you in the room. If they aren't, ask yourself whether you've given them the strategy, context, and coaching they need to operate that way. 

Anticipate and solve complex, cross-functional problems. The challenges at this level don't stay neatly inside your product organization. They cross into engineering, design, commercial, technology, and operations — and they rarely come with a clear playbook. You'll need to develop new approaches with limited information and move with conviction under uncertainty. 

Own budget decisions and resource allocation for your portfolio. Make smart trade-offs on where to invest, how to staff, and what work gets resourced. These decisions have real financial implications and need to be made with both short-term discipline and long-term strategic judgment. 

Make staffing decisions, not just recommendations. Hiring, development, restructuring, and when necessary, the hard calls. You're accountable for building a product organization that can actually execute — and that means making the team management decisions that shape it. 

Partner with Engineering, Design, Data, and Commercial leadership as a peer. At this level, the cross-functional work is more complex, more ambiguous, and higher stakes. You're not coordinating execution — you're co-designing the operating model, resolving competing priorities, and making decisions that affect multiple functions simultaneously. 

Design a team structure and operating model that can handle complexity. Topology is a strategic decision. How teams are organized, what they own, where the boundaries are, and how they interact with each other and with adjacent functions — these choices determine whether your organization can sustain high performance or constantly fights against itself. 

Own the outcomes across your portfolio — fully. If the strategy is unclear, the leaders under-developed, or the operating model broken, that's yours to fix. Don't stop at diagnosing the problem. Solve it. 

What We're Looking For 

You've developed product leaders — Directors, Senior Managers, or equivalent — not just senior individual contributors. You can point to leaders you've shaped: what they struggled with, what you did about it, and where they are now. 

You've owned product strategy for a large or highly complex portfolio. Not one product area — multiple, with interdependencies, competing priorities, and real organizational complexity underneath. 

You know how to make multi-year decisions under uncertainty. You've built strategies that held up over time, and you can explain the analytical and qualitative reasoning that drove them. 

You're an internal authority on product management as a discipline. People across the organization come to you not just for product decisions, but for how to think about product — what great PM work looks like, how to build the capability, and how to structure teams to do it well. 

You've managed budgets, made resource trade-offs, and held yourself accountable for the financial implications of your product decisions. 

You've solved problems that didn't stay inside your product organization. You've navigated cross-functional complexity — engineering tradeoffs, commercial misalignment, data infrastructure gaps — and found new approaches when there was no obvious playbook to follow. 

Engineering, design, and commercial leaders think of you as a genuine strategic peer. You disagree productively, build alignment without steamrolling, and make better decisions because of the partnership — not despite the friction. 

You've built teams with deliberate thought about structure, ownership, and operating model. You treat team topology as a strategic input, not an org chart exercise. 

This Isn't the Right Fit If... 

If you're still energized primarily by hands-on product work and want a bigger portfolio to manage personally, this isn't the role — we have an individual contributor Product Manager path for that. 

If your model of senior leadership is setting strategy once a year and delegating execution, this will feel uncomfortable fast. The complexity of the portfolio and the problems you'll face don't resolve themselves. You'll need to stay close enough to the work to diagnose what's broken and far enough away to let your leaders fix it. 

If you think developing product leaders means occasional feedback conversations, we're looking for something far more deliberate and sustained. And if you need to control the most important decisions across your portfolio to feel effective, this job will frustrate you. The goal is to build an organization where the right decisions happen consistently — with or without you in the room. Your impact comes through the leaders and teams you build.