Director, Product Line Management – Waveserver PLM Team

Ciena’s Waveserver Product Line Management team is seeking a Director of Product Line Management to lead product strategy, roadmap execution, and lifecycle management for the Waveserver portfolio. This role contributes to the direction of high-capacity optical transport solutions by translating customer and market requirements into differentiated products and business outcomes. The position works across multiple functions to support portfolio growth, profitability, and long-term product leadership. 

How you will make an impact: 

• Define and drive Waveserver product strategy, roadmap direction, and investment priorities aligned to portfolio growth and differentiation. 

• Translate customer, sales, and market requirements into product requirements, release priorities, and lifecycle plans. 

• Lead cross-functional alignment across engineering, marketing, supply chain, procurement, services, and sales throughout the product lifecycle. 

• Drive customer engagements, roadmap discussions, RFP/RFQ responses, offer defense activities, and product trials. 

• Develop business cases for features, hardware, software releases, pricing strategies, cost optimization initiatives, and investment decisions. 

• Manage product line performance through revenue planning, volume forecasting, margin improvement, competitive positioning, and lifecycle profitability. 

• Monitor market developments across optical networking, coherent technologies, DCI, hyperscale networking, encryption, automation, open APIs, fiber sensing, and high-capacity aggregation applications. 

The must haves: 

• Education: Bachelor’s or master’s degree in electrical engineering, telecommunications, networking, communications systems, or equivalent practical experience. 

• Experience: 10+ years of relevant industry experience, including at least 5+ years of product line management or equivalent experience. 

• Application of coherent optical systems, DWDM, OTN, Ethernet services, optical transport architectures, coherent pluggables, platform software, and network management concepts. 

• Experience leading new product introductions, developing business cases, and growing product revenue within a competitive technology market. 

• Experience aligning cross-functional teams and influencing stakeholders. 

• Experience with pricing, forecasting, margin management, competitive analysis, and customer value positioning. 

• Experience communicating with executive audiences and customers, managing complex priorities and trade-off decisions, and supporting customer engagements through occasional travel. 

Nice to haves: 

• Education: MBA or equivalent business leadership experience. 

• Experience with hyperscale, cloud, carrier, subsea, government, enterprise, or research and education customer segments. 

• Experience with high-capacity optical transport platforms, compact modular systems, coherent modems, encryption, automation, open management interfaces, or network control software. 

• Experience working directly with global sales teams, field engineering, customer engineering, procurement, and supply chain organizations. 

• Experience leading product decisions through formal product lifecycle, governance, or business decision point processes. 

Pay Range: $166,000 - $265,200 CAD

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