Title:  Sr Director, Strategy & Operations

Job Summary

The Chief Product Officer sets the direction for a multi-billion-dollar portfolio spanning data infrastructure, storage, cloud, and AI. This leader is the strategy partner who makes that direction concrete: sharpening the portfolio point of view, exposing where it is under-invested or exposed, and converting ambiguous market and financial signals into the specific bets the organization should place. It carries no product P&L of its own. Its influence comes from the rigor of its analysis and the trust of the CPO staff whose products it helps steer. This role reports into the VP of Growth, Analytics & AI Native Engineering.

The mandate is to maximize the return on the portfolio's investment. This includes partnering with Product leadership to shape product portfolio investment priorities, combining market, customer, financial, and product insights with NetApp's cost, ROI, and investment models to identify the highest-value opportunities and recommend resource allocation shifts. This leader identifies and evaluates material capability gaps and shapes perspective on build, buy, or partner recommendations—with clear economic, strategic, and time-to-value tradeoffs—to inform CPO staff investment decisions. When acquisition is the preferred path, the role develops the product-side strategic rationale and business case, partnering with Corporate Development and Finance on evaluation and investment recommendations for CPO staff to validate.

When a deal closes, the same leader co-owns with the CPO’s Leadership Team the product-side integration, working through the teams that will inherit the asset to fold in the roadmap, rationalize overlap, and convert promised synergies into realized growth. This Senior Director builds and leads a high-performing team spanning product strategy, growth analysis, market intelligence, portfolio planning, strategic initiatives, and integration management, and is measured on one thing above all: whether the portfolio's bets, organic and inorganic, become durable revenue and margin.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the CPO's strategy partner, turning portfolio direction into a sharp, evidence-based point of view on where the organization should invest, hold, or exit.
• Expose the portfolio's gaps, overlaps, and white space, and guide the organization toward the bets with the clearest path to revenue and margin.
• Shape portfolio investment priorities in partnership with Product Leadership, leveraging NetApp's cost, ROI, and product-investment models to make the case for moving resources to their highest-return use.
• Evaluate material capability gaps with Product leadership and develop build, buy, or partner recommendations, making the strategic, economic, and time-to-value implications explicit for the product owners’ investment decisions.
• Own the upstream corporate-development agenda from the product side, from acquisition thesis and target landscape through qualification and the business case built with Corporate Development and Finance and validated with CPO staff.
• Lead diligence through the product and technical lens, testing whether a target's capability, architecture, and economics deliver the thesis before capital is committed.
• Own product-side integration of acquired businesses, working through the inheriting teams to merge roadmaps, rationalize overlapping products and platforms, and hold the line on synergy realization.
• Develop and institutionalize product acquisition and integration playbooks that tailor integration plans to the type of acquisition, accelerating time-to-value, reducing execution risk, and improving ROI.Build, lead, and develop a high-caliber team of strategy, growth, and integration leaders who influence through insight, analytical rigor, and trusted partnership across Product, Engineering, Corporate Development, Finance, and GTM.

Education and Experience

• 12+ years of experience spanning product strategy, corporate strategy, corporate development partnership, and senior operating leadership roles within enterprise technology.
• Proven success shaping portfolio strategy, driving business and portfolio transformation, and influencing enterprise investment decisions through data-driven insight and executive partnership; Combined experience across top-tier consulting and operating in-house within a scaled technology company preferred.
• Experience leading inorganic growth initiatives, including acquisition strategy, diligence, integration, and value realization; product-side integration expertise strongly preferred.
• Deep fluency in technology business economics, portfolio investment, capital allocation, and growth strategy, combined with technical credibility across data infrastructure, cloud, and AI.
• A proven people leader and executive communicator, able to build a high-caliber team and to move senior stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Finance, Corporate Development, and GTM without relying on formal authority, and to operate with conviction as evidence and direction evolve. 
• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Business,or a related field required; MBA preferred.