As product manager, you are the consummate team player, adept at managing relationships, collaborating and influencing across a variety of organizational functions. You will guide a product team that is charged with a product’s contribution to our business, building new products and increasing the profitability of existing products. In addition, you will help develop new ideas based on your contact with customers and prospects.
You should be prepared to make decisions with imperfect information, know how to lead without authority and be comfortable managing chaos, ambiguity and complexity. You must possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy that includes a big-picture vision and the drive to make that vision a reality. You must also enjoy spending time in the market to understand market problems, and finding innovative solutions for the broader market.
Communications skills are key to success in this role. You will work with a development counterpart to define product release requirements based on market problems. You will work with product marketing and marketing communications to help define the go-to-market strategy by providing key product and market insights. You will also serve as the internal and external evangelist for your product offering, occasionally working to support the sales channel and key customers. In short, you must be prepared to communicate with all areas of the company.
You are a strategist who will translate the company’s high-level vision and goals into actionable tasks. You will set product strategy, prioritize features, build consensus, and coordinate product schedules with your design and engineering teammates.
Key Responsibilities
- Act as the “messenger of the market” from the outside-in to the rest of the organization.
- Analyze various market segments and collaborate with leadership to choose the best ones to pursue.
- Develop a three-year roadmap for our products to illustrate our vision and plan into the future.
- Develop and maintain a business proposal that makes a compelling case for continued investment into your products.
- Collaborate with other stakeholders such as product marketing on the creation of positioning for your products.
- Create user stories for current and future products based on the market’s problems.
- Manage the entire product line life cycle from sunsetting legacy products to prototyping and testing new features/products and ideas.
- Drive buy-build-partner analysis, and where necessary, review potential partner relationships for the product.
- Know why we are winning and losing in the market, and drive changes to our product and processes to create improvement.
- Keep a finger on the pulse of our competition, and develop strategies and tactics to reduce the threat.
Requirements
- 5+ years of marketing, development, sales, or product management experience.
- Tech savvy and passionate about building products.
- Track record of using qualitative and quantitative data to prioritize and drive decision-making.
- Proficient in productivity applications such as Microsoft Office, Project or Basecamp.
- Comfortable using collaboration and CRM tools such as Slack, JIRA, Aha and Salesforce.
- Metrics-driven: Strong analytical and synthesis skills are a must, including the ability to absorb and process large amounts of data into actionable information.
- Experience with best practice agile scrum development and lean startup principles.
- Curious and comfortable holding professional conversations with our target buyers and users.
- Must be a strong writer and public speaker in front of large, senior groups.
- Excellent people and management skills to interact with staff, colleagues, cross-functional teams and third parties.
- Subject matter expert/industry experience a strong plus.
- MBA preferred.
- Pragmatic Institute Certified (PMC) III or higher.
- This position requires domestic and international travel to customer and potential sites up to 25 percent.
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