Product Owner, Revenue Operations

Overview

You're the product owner for PitchBook's revenue operations systems—mainly Salesforce, but also the tools that connect to it (CPQ, billing, data warehouse). You sit between the business (sales, finance, customer success) and the technical team (admins, engineers, data teams). Your job is to figure out what stakeholders need, write requirements, prioritize the backlog, and make sure what gets built actually solves the problem. Dimitri mentioned "major initiatives with transformative impact," which likely means system consolidation, process redesign, or scaling infrastructure for growth.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Mature/Established (PitchBook is owned by Morningstar, acquired in 2016 for $180M)

Size: 1,525 employees

Growth: Actively hiring for RevOps transformation roles. The fact that the Director of RevOps is hiring a Product Owner suggests they're maturing their ops function—moving from reactive firefighting to proactive product thinking.

Market Position: Leader in private capital markets data. Competes with CB Insights, Crunchbase, Preqin. PitchBook has strong brand recognition in VC/PE but operates in a competitive space where data accuracy and platform usability matter.

GTM Reality

Who Uses Your Systems:

• Sales reps (probably 200-400 AEs/SDRs based on company size)
• Customer Success teams managing renewals and expansion
• Finance/Rev Ops teams running billing, forecasting, reporting
• Sales leadership looking at dashboards

System Landscape: PitchBook likely runs Salesforce as the core CRM, probably with CPQ for quoting (given Dimitri's background with Salesforce CPQ and NetSuite). They probably have integrations with marketing automation, data warehouses, and billing systems. At 1,500+ employees, there's complexity—legacy workarounds, technical debt, and processes built for a smaller company that now need to scale.

The Transformation: Dimitri's post mentions "major initiatives." Based on his background (Order-to-Cash transformation, SOX compliance, billing), this likely involves:

• Rebuilding quote-to-cash processes
• Implementing or upgrading CPQ
• Cleaning up data and reporting architecture
• Ensuring compliance for a financial data company

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Stakeholder Meetings (40%) | Requirements/Backlog (30%) | Testing/UAT (20%) | Internal Coordination (10%)

Key Activities

• Stakeholder Discovery: You spend hours in meetings with sales ops, finance, and sales leaders trying to understand what they need. Someone says "we need a field for deal stage," and you have to figure out what they're actually trying to solve—is it forecasting visibility? Pipeline reporting? Commission calculation?
• Writing User Stories: You translate business needs into technical requirements. "As a sales manager, I need to see which deals are at risk so I can coach my reps." Then you work with the Salesforce admin or dev team to spec out fields, workflows, reports, and dashboards.
• Backlog Prioritization: You maintain a product backlog of requests and have to constantly triage. Finance wants a new billing integration. Sales wants mobile app improvements. CS wants automated renewal workflows. You can't do everything, so you're always negotiating priorities.
• UAT and Testing: When something gets built, you test it, coordinate user acceptance testing with the business, and make sure it actually works before rolling it out. You're the one who catches that the new CPQ workflow breaks if someone enters a discount over 20%.
• Documentation and Training: You create process docs and training materials when new features launch. You sit in on calls helping people understand how to use the new system.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Conflicting Priorities: Sales wants fast changes to close deals now. Finance wants methodical, compliant processes. Engineering wants to reduce technical debt. You're in the middle trying to balance all of it, and someone's always unhappy with the timeline.
• Scope Creep: A "simple" field addition turns into rebuilding an entire object model once you dig into it. Projects that should take 2 weeks end up taking 2 months because of dependencies nobody mentioned upfront.
• Legacy Systems: You inherit years of Salesforce customizations built by people who no longer work there. There's no documentation. You spend time reverse-engineering why something was built a certain way before you can change it.
• Communication Gap: Business stakeholders don't speak technical language. Engineers don't understand sales processes. You're constantly translating between the two, and misunderstandings lead to rework.
• Onsite Requirement: You're in the Seattle office full-time. If you prefer remote flexibility, this isn't it.

What Success Looks Like

• You ship the major transformation projects on time without breaking existing processes
• Sales leadership can actually trust the data in their forecasting dashboards
• The number of "urgent" Salesforce tickets decreases because systems are more intuitive and stable
• Stakeholders start coming to you early in their planning process instead of after they've promised something to their team

Who You're Working With

Internal Stakeholders:

• Sales Operations leaders who need better pipeline visibility and forecasting
• Finance teams who need accurate billing data and SOX-compliant processes
• Customer Success Operations building out renewal and expansion workflows
• Sales Enablement teams who need the system to support new playbooks
• Dimitri Woods (your hiring manager), who comes from a finance/billing transformation background

What They Care About:

• Sales Ops: Speed to implement changes, system reliability during quarter-end
• Finance: Data accuracy, auditability, compliance with SOX controls
• CS: Ease of use for reps managing high account volumes
• Engineering: Technical feasibility, maintainability, reducing tech debt

Requirements

• Strong Salesforce knowledge—you need to understand objects, fields, workflows, reporting, and how CPQ works (not just "I've used Salesforce as a user")
• Product Owner or Business Analyst experience in a GTM/RevOps context—you've written user stories, managed backlogs, worked in Agile/Scrum
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical specs—you can talk to a VP of Sales about their forecasting problems and then turn that into a JIRA ticket for a developer
• Stakeholder management skills—you can negotiate priorities, push back on unrealistic timelines, and keep people aligned
• Located in or willing to relocate to Seattle for onsite work
• Experience at a B2B SaaS or data company is helpful but not explicitly required—understanding recurring revenue models and data operations is valuable context

The Reality Check

This isn't a role where you're building a consumer product with a clear roadmap. You're managing an internal platform where your "users" are coworkers who have strong opinions and political capital. You'll spend a lot of time in meetings. You'll deal with requests that seem urgent but aren't strategic. You'll have to tell people "no" or "not yet" regularly.

The upside: You're working on systems that directly impact revenue at a well-established company. If you like solving complex process problems and don't mind the political navigation of internal product ownership, this is solid experience. PitchBook is stable, and RevOps roles here likely pay well and offer good visibility into how a mature SaaS company operates.

The downside: It's onsite in Seattle (expensive city, no remote option), and you're dealing with all the baggage of legacy systems and entrenched processes. If you want greenfield system design or want to work remotely, this isn't it.