Head of Product Operations
Zipline · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
About Zipline
Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.
Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.
Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.
We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.
About You and The Role
As Head of Product Operations, you will build and lead Zipline's Product Operations function. Your mission is to make the product organization dramatically more effective by improving how products are planned, built, launched, measured, and operated.
You'll work across Product Management, Engineering, Design, Operations, Data Science, Commercial, Customer Success, and Executive Leadership to establish the operating system for product development at Zipline.
This is not a traditional program management role. You will define operating rhythms, improve product quality, create organizational leverage through better tooling and processes, and ensure every product launch is measurable, operationally ready, and delivers meaningful customer outcomes.
As Zipline scales autonomous delivery around the world, Product Operations will become the connective tissue between product strategy and operational execution.
In your first year, you will establish a consistent operating cadence for product planning and reviews, standardize launch readiness and post-launch review processes, improve cross-functional execution, reduce time-to-launch while increasing launch quality, act as the conduit between headquarters and the field, and become a trusted leader for operational excellence within Product.
This role is based in South San Francisco, with regular onsite collaboration and occasional travel to launch sites to observe operations, gather customer and operator feedback, and ensure products are delivering value in the field.
What You'll Do
Build the Product Operating System
- Build and continuously improve the operating model for Product Management across planning, roadmaps, reviews, launches, and post-launch measurement.
- Standardize product development processes without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Design operating cadences including roadmap reviews, quarterly planning, launch readiness reviews, and executive product reviews.
Improve Product Quality
- Define launch readiness standards across engineering, operations, legal, safety, customer support, and commercial teams.
- Ensure every launch includes clear success metrics, operational playbooks, monitoring, rollback plans, and ownership.
- Drive post-launch reviews and ensure learnings are incorporated into future development.
Drive Operational Excellence
- Build dashboards that measure product health, launch quality, adoption, reliability, and customer outcomes.
- Partner with Data Science to define product KPIs and improve measurement across the organization.
- Identify systemic bottlenecks slowing product delivery and implement scalable solutions.
Enable Product Teams
- Develop templates, documentation, decision frameworks, and tooling that allow Product Managers to spend more time solving customer problems.
- Improve the quality of PRDs, decision documents, experimentation plans, and roadmap communication.
- Own the Product team's internal knowledge management systems.
Improve Cross-Functional Execution
- Partner closely with Engineering, Design, Operations, Commercial, Customer Success, Marketplace Operations, and Safety to improve cross-functional alignment.
- Create clear ownership boundaries, decision-making frameworks, and escalation paths.
- Reduce organizational friction between product teams and operational stakeholders.
Operationalize Product Launches
- Lead cross-functional launch planning for major initiatives.
- Coordinate readiness across customer communications, training, support documentation, field operations, monitoring, analytics, and incident response.
- Ensure launches transition smoothly from development into day-to-day operations.
Build Product Feedback Loops
- Establish scalable systems for collecting insights from field operations, customer support, commercial teams, and customers.
- Ensure product teams have continuous visibility into operational pain points and customer feedback.
- Translate recurring issues into actionable product opportunities.
Scale the Organization
- Help define planning frameworks, portfolio management, resource allocation, and organizational priorities.
- Introduce best practices from high-performing technology organizations while adapting them to Zipline's unique operational environment.
- Build and lead a high-performing Product Operations team over time.
What You'll Bring
- 10+ years of experience in Product Operations, Product Management, Program Management, Strategy & Operations, or related leadership roles.
- Experience building Product Operations functions at a high-growth technology company.
- Strong understanding of modern product development practices, product organizations, and software delivery.
- Proven ability to improve organizational effectiveness through better systems, tooling, and operational rigor.
- Excellent analytical skills with experience defining KPIs, building dashboards, and measuring organizational performance.
- Exceptional cross-functional leadership and influence without direct authority.
- Strong program management skills with experience coordinating large, complex product launches.
- Excellent written communication with experience producing executive-ready decision documents, operating reviews, and strategic planning materials.
- Comfortable working with engineers, designers, data scientists, and operational leaders.
- Demonstrated ability to simplify complex organizational problems into scalable processes.
- Experience with SQL, analytics platforms, experimentation frameworks, or operational metrics is a plus.
- Experience supporting products with significant operational, logistics, marketplace, or hardware components is preferred.
What Else You Need To Know
Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.
We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!
Voluntary Self-Identification
For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.
As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.