About the Role:

Gusto is looking for a Senior Talent Development Leader to treat our highest-stakes talent systems as evolving products. This role requires a product-management lens, balancing long-term product strategy with rigorous product operations. On one side, you will own the product roadmap and lifecycle for Gusto's high-potential talent acceleration and executive development offerings, ensuring these products deliver a distinct and additive value proposition for our most promising leaders. On the other, you will own the end-to-end product health and user experience of our Quarterly Performance Review cycle. This means managing the strategic operating plan, the technical partnerships, and the cross-functional coordination required to ensure the performance process is a seamless, impactful experience for every Gustie and People Empowerer.

These two focus areas form a cohesive talent ecosystem: talent acceleration products rely on the high-fidelity signals surfaced by a trustworthy performance evaluation product. Conversely, a well-run review cycle serves as the primary discovery engine for future leadership potential. In this role, you will hold ownership over a robust portfolio of critical offerings, driving continuous definition and improvement on each to ensure they complement one another within a unified talent ecosystem. AI is integrated into your product management approach, not as an add-on, but as a core lever for automating mechanics and surfacing readiness signals with greater precision. You will determine where AI leads the experience and where human intervention remains critical, evolving these products as the tools and the business change.

About the Team:

The Talent Development team acts as a strategic partner to the business, diagnosing capability needs and architecting systems that empower employees to build their best careers. We move beyond traditional programs to design the organizational conditions that create clarity, connection, and commitment. By partnering with HR and business leaders, we align learning directly to organizational strategy, using AI and design to embed development into the flow of work.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• High-Potential Talent Product Strategy: Define and own the end-to-end product lifecycle for our high-potential talent acceleration offering. Define the product roadmap, user value proposition, and inclusion criteria in partnership with Gusto executive leaders, People Partners, and business unit leaders, ensuring the product is positioned as an acceleration engine rather than remediation.
• Product Delivery & Facilitation: Lead the end-to-end delivery of these offerings. Partner with executive leaders to design, launch, and execute the high-potential talent strategy. You are responsible for ensuring the "user experience" of these programs is seamless and delivers measurable acceleration outcomes.
• Executive Development Product: Act as the product owner for our executive development portfolio, including third-party coaching partnerships. Manage the roadmap, utilization, and impact of these offerings, collaborating with executive stakeholders to ensure our executive coaching products remain high-impact and scalable.
• Performance Review Product Strategy: Treat the quarterly performance review process as a high-stakes internal product, defining the roadmap for process evolution, user experience goals, and efficiency metrics. Ensure the cycle consistently delivers meaningful development and assessment outcomes across the organization.
• Product Operations & Lifecycle Management: Manage the end-to-end delivery of the performance cycle—from planning and readiness tracking to final calibration. Own the operational calendar and product milestones, ensuring each launch, progression, and close is seamless and predictable for all users (People Empowerers and Gusties).
• Product Experience & Communications: Act as the product owner for the user experience of the performance cycle. Lead the communication strategy and stakeholder engagement, ensuring clear messaging, alignment with People Partners, and effective escalation pathways. Design the experience to minimize friction and maximize clarity.
• Feedback Loops & Product Iteration: Own the product health and continuous improvement loop. Synthesize qualitative and quantitative feedback to drive iterative improvements. Partner with People Tech to define tooling requirements, prioritizing design and tooling fixes over manual process work to create a more scalable, automated, and impactful performance product.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• You've run a high stakes talent process for a whole company and you know the difference between a process that merely completes and one people trust.
• You can design a program from a blank page (high-potential talent criteria, cohort structure, a coaching partnership) and you can also execute a recurring operational plan with zero dropped threads. Most people are better at one of these. We need both.
• You're the go-to expert PEs, People Partners, and executives trust on high-stakes talent process questions, and you resolve root causes by shaping the standards and systems others follow.
• You already think about where AI can take manual work off a process like this, not as a future idea but as something you'd start doing in your first quarter.
• You build relationships with People Partners and business leaders easily, because most of this role's real work happens through them, not around them.
• Typically 12+ years of relevant experience (or 8+ with an advanced degree) in talent development, talent management, or HR programs, including designing and running enterprise-wide talent processes

Our cash compensation amount for this role is $150,640/yr to $1185,789/yr in Denver & most major metro locations, and $177,020/yr to $218,325/yr for San Francisco & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.