Principal Product Manager, AI Products - Cisco… at Cisco · Austin

Principal Product Manager, AI Products - Cisco Networking Location: San Francisco, California, US The application window is expected to close on: 06/30/2026 Job posting may be removed earlier if the position is filled or if a sufficient number of applications are received. Meet the Team Cisco ThousandEyes is a Digital Assurance platform that empowers organizations to deliver flawless digital experiences across every network - even the ones they don’t own. Powered by AI and an unmatched set of cloud, internet and enterprise network telemetry data, ThousandEyes enables IT teams to proactively detect, diagnose, and remediate issues - before they impact end- user experiences. ThousandEyes is deeply integrated across the entire Cisco technology portfolio and beyond, helping customers deploy at scale while also delivering AI-powered assurance insights within Cisco’s leading Networking, Security, Collaboration, and Observability portfolios. Your Impact We are seeking a Principal Product Manager to own the go-to-market strategy for AI-powered use cases across Cisco Networking and to aggregate intelligence across domains into a coherent product narrative that drives customer adoption and competitive differentiation. This role sits at the intersection of multiple AI product lines and networking platforms. The underlying use cases — troubleshooting, optimization, deployment, remediation — span business units and technologies. Your job is to curate the right use cases, synthesize intelligence from across the portfolio, and take that story to market: to customers, analysts, field sales, and Cisco leadership. Responsibilities Own use case strategy: Curate and prioritize the use case portfolio across AI product lines. Decide what ships, what's deferred, and what matters to customers — not just what demos well. Aggregate intelligence across domains: Synthesize adoption data, customer feedback, competitive signals, and engineering capabilities into a unified view of where Cisco's AI networking products stand and where they're headed. Drive go-to-market: Own the GTM narrative for Cisco Networking's AI capabilities. Coordinate launches, availability programs, and customer enablement with GTM teams. Define positioning and messaging frameworks. Shape external narrative: Author the product story for executive leadership, analyst engagements (Gartner, etc.), and customer-facing presentations. Own competitive differentiation and the Cisco Live strategy. Define agent taxonomy and messaging: Frame how agentic capabilities are communicated externally — categories, composition, autonomy levels. Keep messaging grounded in what's shipping. Bridge networking and central AI: Own the cross-BU relationship with Cisco's Central AI organization. Advocate for networking-specific requirements and ensure domain use cases are represented. Drive customer adoption: Engage directly with enterprise customers to validate use cases, define adoption frameworks, and shape the path from early availability to general availability. Build coalitions: Align stakeholders across GTM, field sales, analyst relations, CX, and engineering. Ensure the AI story is coherent across every audience. Technical Depth: A trusted technical, domain, and functional expert who establishes deep trust with engineering at the architectural level. You make product-level technical judgments — what's feasible, what's ready, when to pivot — and help guide others across the organization on technical outcomes. Communication: You articulate and evangelize the product vision internally and externally. You influence executive and industry stakeholders daily. You craft narratives that unify diverse audiences and move the company in the right direction. Product Sense: You define new product categories and market opportunities. You set long-term strategic direction and establish organizational product frameworks that uplift the entire team. Collaboration: You build coalitions across organizations and domains. You mentor product leaders and cross-functional partners. You align and mobilize leadership teams around shared goals. Bias for Action: You drive bold, company-wide pivots. You execute independently, at scale, with speed. You navigate extreme ambiguity and bring the rest of the organization with you. Business Acumen: You shape the company's business model and advise executives on high-impact opportunities. You influence investment and resource allocation decisions. Scope: End-to-end ownership of 4-5 large, high-value product areas, with influence across ThousandEyes and the broader Cisco organization. Qualifications Qualifications 10+ years of product management experience shipping enterprise/SaaS software products, ideally in networking, cloud, or monitoring. Strong GTM instincts — you turn technical capabilities into customer-facing stories that sell. Experience with field sales, analyst relations, and marketing. Experience with AI/ML technologies — large language models, agentic architectures, multi-agent systems. You know what's real vs. what's hype. Ability to synthesize across multiple product lines and domains into a unified narrative and prioritized roadmap. Excellent written and verbal communication — you can brief a Gartner analyst, a CIO, and engineering leadership in the same week. Experience navigating matrixed organizations and building coalitions across competing priorities. Strong ownership. You organize the meetings, write the first draft, and make the call. Bachelor's degree in CS, engineering, or equivalent. Advanced degree is a plus. Why Cisco? At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere. We are Cisco, and our power starts with you. Message to applicants applying to work in the U.S. and/or Canada: The starting salary range posted for this position is $225,000.00 to $325,300.00 and reflects the projected salary range for new hires in this position in U.S. and/or Canada locations, not including incentive compensation*, equity, or benefits. Individual pay is determined by the candidate's hiring location, market conditions, job-related skillset, experience, qualifications, education, certifications, and/or training. The full salary range for certain locations is listed below. For locations not listed below, the recruiter can share more details about compensation for the role in your location during the hiring process. U.S. employees are offered benefits, subject to Cisco’s plan eligibility rules, which include medical, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with a Cisco matching contribution, paid parental leave, short and long-term disability coverage, and basic life insurance. Please see the Cisco careers site to discover more benefits and perks.  Employees may be eligible to receive grants of Cisco restricted stock units, which vest following continued employment with Cisco for defined periods of time. U.S. employees are eligible for paid time away as described below, subject to Cisco’s policies: 10 paid holidays per full calendar year, plus 1 floating holiday for non-exempt employees 1 paid day off for employee’s birthday, paid year-end holiday shutdown, and 4 paid days off for personal wellness determined by Cisco Non-exempt employees** receive 16 days of paid vacation time per full calendar year, accrued at rate of 4.92 hours per pay period for full-time employees Exempt employees participate in Cisco’s flexible vacation time off program, which has no defined limit on how much vacation time eligible employees may use (subject to availability and some business limitations) 80 hours of sick time off provided on hire date and each January 1st thereafter, and up to 80 hours of unused sick time carried forward from one calendar year to the next Additional paid time away may be requested to deal with critical or emergency issues for family members Optional 10 paid days per full calendar year to volunteer For non-sales roles, employees are also eligible to earn annual bonuses subject to Cisco’s policies. Employees on sales plans earn performance-based incentive pay on top of their base salary, which is split between quota and non-quota components, subject to the applicable Cisco plan. For quota-based incentive pay, Cisco typically pays as follows: .75% of incentive target for each 1% of revenue attainment up to 50% of quota; 1.5% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 50% and 75%; 1% of incentive target for each 1% of attainment between 75% and 100%; and Once performance exceeds 100% attainment, incentive rates are at or above 1% for each 1% of attainment with no cap on incentive compensation. For non-quota-based sales performance elements such as strategic sales objectives, Cisco may pay 0% up to 125% of target. Cisco sales plans do not have a minimum threshold of performance for sales incentive compensation to be paid. The applicable full salary ranges for this position, by specific state, are listed below: New York City Metro Area: $225,000.00 - $374,100.00 Non-Metro New York state & Washington state: $208,600.00 - $330,000.00 * For quota-based sales roles on Cisco’s sales plan, the ranges provided in this posting include base pay and sales target incentive compensation combined. ** Employees in Illinois, whether exempt or non-exempt, will participate in a unique time off program to meet local requirements. Additional Locations: Austin, Texas, US, Seattle, Washington, US