Product Manager
Introduction
A career in IBM Software means you'll be part of a team that transforms our customer's challenges into industry-leading solutions.
We are an infinitely curious team, always seeking new possibilities, and dedicated to creating the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native software solutions. Our renowned legacy creates endless global opportunities for our network of IBMers. We are a team of deep product experts, ensuring exceptional client experiences, with a focus on delivery, excellence, and obsession over customer outcomes.
IBM's product and technology landscape includes Research, Software, and Infrastructure. Entering this domain positions you at the heart of IBM, where growth and innovation thrive.
Your role and responsibilities
We are seeking a highly motivated and strategic Product Manager to lead the product delivery, operations, and roadmap for the ContextForge MCP Gateway.
ContextForge is a production-grade gateway, proxy, and registry for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and A2A Agents. It federates MCP and REST services, providing unified discovery, auth, rate-limiting, observability, virtual servers, multi-transport protocols, plugins and an Admin UI: https://github.com/IBM/mcp-context-forge
As the Senior Product Manager, you will report directly to the Product Owner, and execute the product roadmap for ContextForge, working closely with Product Owner, and the CTO whom drive the overall vision. You will translate the CTO's strategic vision into detailed feature specifications, balance customer feedback with technical roadmap priorities, and manage stakeholders across three geographic teams.
You will also connect regularly with internal and external customers to collect their feedback and perspective regarding MCP ContextForge on an ongoing basis. Lastly, you will work with the Product Owner and CTO to develop and operationalize enablement assets for Commercial Go-To-Market teams and Commercial or OSS industry events. This role requires deep technical understanding, customer empathy, and the ability to operate in both open-source and commercial enterprise contexts with cross-functional excellence being paramount to success.
Your Role And ResponsibilitiesProduct Strategy & Execution
• Work closely with the Product Owner to define the overall product strategy, customer and field facing material, and requirements process
• Translate CTO's product vision into detailed feature specifications and user stories
• Balance customer feedback (OAuth2/SSO, RBAC, virtual servers) with technical roadmap priorities
• Define, monitor, and analyze weekly success metrics across the program
• Manage dual GTM (go-to-market) strategy: open-source community + commercial enterprise licensing
• Create product narratives that translate technical concepts (MCP protocol, federation) into customer value
Customer Discovery & Requirements
• Conduct customer discovery with enterprise AI teams, developer community, and IBM stakeholders
• Gather and prioritize requirements from diverse user personas: developers, DevOps, security teams, executives
• Analyze telemetry and usage patterns: Prometheus metrics, adoption funnels, feature utilization
• Hands-on customer engagement: demos, proof-of-concepts, technical sales support
• Build feedback loops from GitHub issues, community forums, and enterprise customer conversations
Stakeholder Management
• Manage stakeholders across multiple geographic teams
• Coordinate with Engineering Manager to align product roadmap with technical feasibility
• Partner with CTO and Product Owner on strategic product decisions and roadmap prioritization
• Work with open-source community: GitHub discussions, public roadmap, contribution guidelines
• Collaborate with Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing on GTM execution
Product Operations
• Maintain product backlog with clear prioritization and acceptance criteria
• Define and track product metrics: adoption, engagement, retention, customer satisfaction
• Create product documentation: user guides, API references, migration guides, release notes
• Plan and coordinate product releases: feature flags, beta programs, deprecation schedules
• Analyze competitive landscape and market trends in AI infrastructure and developer tools
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
Product Management
• Few years of product management experience or in a technical and client facing role
• Experience with dual GTM: open-source community building + enterprise product management
• Strong technical depth to engage with engineers on architecture and feasibility discussions
• Proven track record of launching products that achieved measurable adoption and revenue growth
• Data-driven decision making with strong analytical skills and metrics-oriented approach
Technical Understanding
• Deep understanding of API design, RESTful services, and protocol specifications
• Knowledge of authentication/authorization: OAuth2, JWT, SSO, RBAC
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts: federation, service discovery, caching, multi-tenancy
• Understanding of DevOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code
• Ability to read and understand Python code for technical feasibility discussions
Developer Tools & Infrastructure
• Experience with developer-facing products: APIs, SDKs, CLI tools, gateways, proxies
• Understanding of observability and monitoring: metrics, logs, traces, dashboards
• Knowledge of containerization (Docker/Kubernetes) and cloud infrastructure
• Familiarity with security and compliance requirements: SOC2, GDPR, audit logging
Open Source & Community
• Experience managing open-source projects with public roadmaps and community contributions
• Understanding of open-source licensing models (Apache 2.0, MIT, etc.)
• Ability to balance community needs with enterprise customer requirements
• Experience with GitHub-based workflows: issues, discussions, pull requests, releases
Communication & Leadership
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences
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• Strong presentation skills: customer demos, executive briefings, conference talks
• Ability to create compelling product narratives and customer-facing content
• Cross-functional leadership: influence without authority, build consensus, resolve conflicts
Preferred technical and professional experience
Advanced Product Skills
• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, agentic systems, or protocol-based products
• Background in enterprise software with complex security and compliance requirements
• Experience with developer advocacy or technical evangelism
• Track record of successful product launches in competitive markets
Technical Depth
• Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar protocol specifications
• Understanding of A2A (Agent-to-Agent) architectures and AI agent orchestration
• Experience with gateway/proxy technologies: API gateways, service meshes, reverse proxies
• Knowledge of multi-transport protocols: SSE, WebSocket, HTTP/2, gRPC
Market & Domain Expertise
• Deep understanding of AI infrastructure and developer tools landscape
• Experience with platform products that serve developer audiences
• Knowledge of federated systems and distributed architecture patterns
• Background in SaaS product management with usage-based pricing models
Community & Ecosystem
• Active participation in open-source communities or developer ecosystems
• Experience building developer communities and fostering contribution
• Understanding of developer personas: platform engineers, AI researchers, application developers
• Experience with technical content creation: blog posts, tutorials, case studies
ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT
IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence-from machine learning to generative AI-to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM's AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM's hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments-a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.
YOUR LIFE @ IBM
In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.
Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.
Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.
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ABOUT IBM
IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.
Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we're also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.
At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it's time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.
IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.
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