Job Description

Senior Product Manager

Permanent

Remote

A software development company who builds cloud software that grows their clients businesses has opened a new role within their organisation. The companys work covers a variety of industries and a range of apps and IoT software projects. Clients include startups, scale-ups and enterprises that need brand new cloud software or upgrade or replace existing software.

Join a creative team of product managers, UX designers & researchers, software architects, software developers and QA analysts & engineers dedicated to delivering software that delivers value to our clients and engaging experiences to users.

We are serious about always learning new things. We create the time and opportunities for you to learn and develop new skills and actively promote and compensate you for taking on more responsibility aligned with your career goals.

What does working with us look like?

• Exposure to a range of industries, projects and technologies
• Work in teams of product managers, UX designers & researchers, software developers and QA
• Work remotely but not in isolation
• Continuously learn about new shiny things with allocated training budget and time
• A mentor with the experience in the skills that you want to develop

The Role

It will be your job to lead a cross-functional team to help the client discover the right software to build that would be valuable to their business, usable to their users and technically feasible. We believe a good product manager is experienced in at least one of the following areas: business, user experience or technology. You will be reporting to the Head of Product Management.

Responsibilities:

Business Strategy

Business strategy is what allows a business to grow and thrive. Laying out the objectives of a business over a specified time and developing ways to achieve and manage those objectives within the product context.

• Understanding the business context, researching target markets, competitors and advising stakeholders on business strategy
• High level service design to ensure the overall customer journey embodied in the business process supports the product
• Understanding the complex business models that may be unique to the customer

Product Strategy

Taking a product vision, interrogating the details, determining the strategy for turning the vision into a successful product.

• Advise on product vision that supports the business strategy
• Problem definition using product discovery techniques
• Solution definition focused on solving user problems
• Building a business case for development
• Product marketing support to ensure alignment on user benefits and communication strategy

Project Execution

The day-to-day skills needed to ensure that the product strategy is successfully implemented by a product team.

• Applying agile development methodologies to product development
• Client stakeholder engagement and expectation management with regard to scope, budget, and timeline
• Lean product metrics and analytics to ensure business goals are being met
• Managing resource allocation to the project
• Ensuring project cost estimates are correct and well communicated with stakeholders
• Product owner support (the product owner is client-side and often inexperienced with making software)
• Release planning

Leadership

Product managers are not in charge of the product teams, but they do have the best overall view of the project. As such, they are responsible for helping team mates be productive and work well together.

• Lead an empowered cross-functional team (UX designers & researchers, software developers, QA analysts & engineers)
• Mentor team members from all functional areas with regard to product and business outcomes and objectives and key results
• Awareness of team member performance, giving recognition or rectifying problems with compassion

About you

You are a phenomenal communicator who has deep empathy with all stakeholders: clients, users, UX practitioners, software developers, project sponsors, etc. You can see stakeholder issues before they arise and arent afraid of resolving them with radical candour. A single day for you can consist of re-establishing the focus on the product vision, refining the backlog, facilitating a design sprint, poring over the data, conducting customer discovery interviews and a myriad other things. This is no mean feat, but you enjoy the challenge.

You are extremely eager to learn and will never stop learning no matter how senior you get. You are not afraid to try new techniques and can understand complex problems to such an extent that you can enable the team to address the problem effectively, using their toolbox of business acumen, UX and technology.

You are probably also entrepreneurial.

Knowledge and Skills:

Firstly, you need the skills to take on the responsibilities specified above. You also need a love for:

• Being immersed in tech
• Thinking critically
• People-first thinking
• Collaboration and teamwork

Meaningful personal growth and the ability to notice and steer clear of:

• being defensive
• always being right
• blame-shifting
• an us & them attitude in your own thinking and behaviour, as well as that of the people around you.

Experience:

• Minimum 8 years of total work experience
• Minimum 5 years experience in Agile software development
• One of the following:

• Minimum 5 years experience as a product manager with 2 years as a project manager
• Minimum 5 years experience as a project manager with 2 years as either a product manager or a business analyst

ExecutivePlacements.com