The Role
Own the product roadmap for an ecosystem area focused on reducing customer and operational friction. Translate business needs into requirements, prioritize backlogs, coordinate engineering delivery, define success metrics, and manage launches. Partner with Sales and Customer Success to identify recurring issues, establish structured feedback processes, communicate progress, and facilitate cross-functional trade-offs without direct authority.
Summary Generated by Built In
Be yourself at Protolabs
Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to building a diverse team that feels they are valued in the workplace. So do you feel you do not meet every single requirement but still intrigued? We encourage you to still apply! You can help make our company even better. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, age, mental or physical ability, or any way you represent yourself. We strongly believe diversity makes for more successful teams.
Why Protolabs?
We are the leaders in digital manufacturing. We hire doers, makers, and creative thinkers who tackle our roles with an entrepreneurial spirit. Our culture is centered around meaningful work that brings new and innovative products to market at unprecedented speeds. We are a diverse team that comes from all walks of life and take pride in our team who is smart, genuine, humble, and passionate about what we do. It’s our people who fuel our creativity and make our culture feel like home.
Join our team as a Technical Product Manager, Fight Friction!
This is a fixed hybrid role (M/F remote; Tues-Thurs onsite) at HQ in Maple Plain, MN.
What You'll Do
- Own and maintain the product roadmap for the assigned ecosystem area, balancing new capability development against friction-reduction and quality-of-experience work
- Translate business and customer needs into clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria for the engineering team
- Prioritize the backlog using a consistent framework, balancing engineering capacity, customer/business impact, and cross-functional input
- Partner with engineering leads on release planning, scope trade-offs, and delivery timelines; coordinate launch and rollout activities
- Define and track success metrics for shipped work, including adoption, quality, and friction-reduction indicators
- Partner directly with Sales and Customer Success to systematically surface friction points across the ecosystem — including lost or stalled deals, recurring support escalations, churn signals, and workaround patterns — and translate them into a prioritized, actionable backlog
- Act as the coordination point between engineering, Sales, and Customer Success so that friction-related fixes move through hand-offs cleanly rather than stalling between teams, despite having no direct authority over those teams
- Establish and run a recurring intake and feedback loop (e.g., regular syncs, a shared submission process, or office hours) so Sales and Customer Success have a known, reliable channel for raising friction issues rather than relying on ad hoc escalation
- Report on friction-reduction progress using concrete before/after metrics (e.g., ticket volume, time-to-resolution, deal-blocking issues resolved, repeat-escalation rate), and communicate that progress back to Sales, Customer Success, and engineering leadership
- Facilitate trade-off conversations when friction-reduction priorities compete with other roadmap commitments, ensuring decisions and rationale are visible to all stakeholders
- Represent the voice of the customer and front-line teams in engineering planning and prioritization discussions
- Identify opportunities for continuous improvement in how the team identifies, triages, and resolves ecosystem friction.
What It Takes
- A degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 4+ years' experience in technical product management, ideally supporting a software engineering team
- Experience working directly with Sales and/or Customer Success teams, ideally in a cross-functional, platform, or ecosystem-facing role
- Experience coordinating delivery across multiple teams without direct authority over those teams
- Prior experience in a platform, ecosystem, or internal-tools product role spanning multiple customer-facing teams
- Experience building or running a formal intake/feedback process between product and go-to-market teams
- Exposure to complex operational environments where technology, people and process all need to work together
Preferred Qualifications
You Might Be a Great Fit If
- Comfortable working with funnels, experiments and cost/benefit framing to support decisions
- Ability to define clear success metrics and measure product performance against business outcomes and KPIs
- User-centric mindset with the ability to balance customer, business and operational considerations
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Able to create clarity in complex domains and build alignment without direct authority
- Pragmatic, decisive and impact-oriented: you focus on outcomes over outputs
Product & analytical skills
Collaboration & communication
What's In It For You!
- We offer a competitive salary and total rewards package
- We offer amazing benefits including but not limited to:
- Health Insurance: Traditional OR High Deductible plan
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Health Savings Account (including employer contributions)
- Dental and Vision
- Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance
- Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
- Paid caregiver leave
- You will receive at least 3 weeks of PTO + Wellness + Holiday Pay + Volunteer Hours
- 401k with company match and immediate vest
- Employee Stock Purchase Program at a discounted rate
- Matching grants through Protolabs foundation
- And More!
Proto Labs maintains ITAR-compliant operations in all of our United States based facilities. Due to ITAR regulations, this role is only open to U.S. Citizens, lawful permanent residents (green card holders) or foreign nationals granted refugee or asylee status. Individuals with temporary visas (e.g. E, F-1, H-1, H-2, L, B, J, TN or OPT) are not eligible for hire in this role.
Proto Labs, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer
Physical Demands:
While performing the essential duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use a computer keyboard, monitor and mouse, telephone and printer; reach with hands, and arms, talk, see and hear. The employee is occasionally required to stand, walk, stoop or kneel and must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds.
Work Environment:
Indoors (A/C); nonsmoking; the majority of this job function is performed in an office setting requiring normal safety precautions. However, there may be job duties that require the employee to spend time in the manufacturing areas exposed to machinery and noise; eye protection occasionally required. Occasionally works in outside weather conditions. Occasionally works near moving mechanical parts and in high, precarious places and is occasionally exposed to wet and/or humid conditions, fumes or airborne particles, toxic or caustic chemicals, risk of electrical shock and vibration. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate.
Skills Required
- Degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- At least 4 years of experience in technical product management, ideally supporting a software engineering team
- Experience working directly with Sales and/or Customer Success teams
- Experience coordinating delivery across multiple teams without direct authority
- Prior experience in a platform, ecosystem, or internal-tools product role spanning multiple customer-facing teams
- Experience building or running a formal intake or feedback process between product and go-to-market teams
- Exposure to complex operational environments involving technology, people, and process
- Comfort working with funnels, experiments, cost-benefit analysis, success metrics, and business KPIs
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders
Protolabs Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Protolabs and has not been reviewed or approved by Protolabs.
-
Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision options are broadly available and described as good to excellent. Additional protections like short- and long-term disability and life insurance bolster the overall package.
-
Leave & Time Off Breadth — A starting PTO allotment plus paid holidays, along with added wellness and volunteer time, is emphasized, with some roles noting PTO growth over tenure. Paid caregiver leave appears in postings and supports flexibility for life events.
-
Retirement Support — A 401(k) with company match and immediate vesting is offered, supporting long-term savings. This foundation is frequently cited alongside core financial benefits as a strong element of total rewards.
Protolabs Insights
Am I A Good Fit?
Get Personalized Job Insights.
Our AI-powered fit analysis compares your resume with a job listing so you know if your skills & experience align.
Success! Refresh the page to see how your skills align with this role.
The Company
What We Do
Protolabs is the world's fastest digital manufacturing source for rapid prototyping and on-demand production. The technology-enabled company produces custom parts and assemblies in as fast as 1 day with automated 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, and injection molding processes. Our digital approach to manufacturing enables accelerated time to market, reduces development and production costs, and minimizes risk throughout the product life cycle. 3D Printing Our 3D printing service offers a wide selection of materials and technologies to create prototypes and end-use parts with complex geometries and detailed features. With tight process controls, careful design reviews, and extensive quality monitoring, we ensure precise and repeatable 3D-printed parts, every time. CNC Machining We use 3- and 5-axis milling along with turning to machine parts from commercial-grade plastics and metals. Our online quoting system and automated manufacturing process enable us to ship parts within 24 hours, helping customers accelerate development and reduce time to market. Sheet Metal Fabrication Protolabs is an industry leader in quick-turn sheet metal parts for both prototyping and low-volume production. Our digital approach to manufacturing enables us to fabricate sheet metal parts in as fast as 5 days. Additionally, we can support our customers’ development efforts with component assemblies, several finish options, and screen printing. Injection Molding Our injection molding service offers two options—prototyping and on-demand manufacturing—which provide customers a tooling solution that aligns with their project’s requirements. It’s used for quick-turn prototyping, bridge tooling, and low-volume production of up to 10,000+ parts in 15 days or less.
