Enterprise Practice Lead (Product Mgmt) (Remote from anywhere in CO)

Enterprise Practice Lead, Product Management

The Colorado Governor's Office of Information Technology is in the middle of a transformation worth joining. We're building cross-functional pod teams that partner directly with agencies to design, deliver, and continuously improve services that work for Coloradans. Good government depends on technology that works — and OIT exists to make that true for every Coloradan. The State of Colorado is seeking an Enterprise Practice Lead, Product Management to help build the next generation of public services. We're looking for people who want to do the best work of their careers in service of the public. The Enterprise Practice Lead, Product Management is the keeper of product craft across every pod. Where the Product Manager (PM) embedded in a pod owns what gets built and why, the Enterprise Lead owns how product management is practiced at OIT. This means owning the standards, tools, training, and career infrastructure that make every PM better at their job. This is not a delivery role. The Enterprise Practice Lead doesn't manage backlogs or run planning cycles. They build the community and the conditions under which every PM across the portfolio can do those things well. Guilds at OIT enable consistency, quality, and community across a federated team structure. IT Directors (ITDs) are responsible for the people management of their pod of practitioners; Enterprise Practice Leads guide and support the practitioners to deliver good work.

What you'll do:

• Define and maintain backlog standards, story-writing conventions, prioritization frameworks, and planning cadence expectations that apply across all pods, grounded in outcome orientation, not activity tracking.
• Establish tooling standards: which tools to use, how they're configured, and what consistency looks like across the portfolio without locking teams into configurations that don't serve their context. Lean in on AI.
• Translate EA product principles into practical guidance that can apply in their specific agency contexts without needing to interpret enterprise strategy themselves.
• Identify patterns of practice weakness across the portfolio: backlogs driven by stakeholder requests rather than user needs, prioritization that is implicit rather than documented, and product ownership effectively outsourced to a vendor. Design systemic responses to each pattern.
• Develop the Colorado equivalent of 18F's product framing discipline: shared tools like problem statements, product vision documents, and success metric frameworks that everyone can use to ground their work in outcomes.
• Run a product management guild: regular convenings, peer critique, shared retrospectives, and the informal culture of a discipline that takes its craft seriously.
• Develop a career pathway and competency framework that creates legible growth from early-career through senior practitioner, drawing on GDS's Digital and Data Capability Framework as a reference point.
• Build and deliver training programs that build sustainable, statewide capability through ongoing investment in modern product practice rather than one-time workshops, and guiding the mindset shift from requirements-gathering to outcome-ownership.
• Create and maintain shared resources that practitioners across pods can adapt without starting from scratch, such as templates, playbooks, and examples of strong backlogs and prioritization rationale.
• Advise ITDs on professional development needs and craft performance: what good looks like at a given level, how to give meaningful feedback, and how to recognize when a backlog problem is a skill gap versus a structural or stakeholder-management problem.
• Distinguish between a practitioner skill gap, a pod structural problem, and an agency partnership problem, and advise accordingly.
• Surface patterns of weak research practice across pods that point to a training or standards gap rather than individual performance.

What you bring:

• Knowledge of product management at a deep practitioner level: backlog ownership, prioritization frameworks (value vs. effort, now/next/later, RICE), outcome-based roadmapping, OKR development, and what it means to govern a product rather than a project.
• Knowledge of Agile and iterative delivery: how sprint planning, refinement, reviews, and retrospectives work, and what good participation in each looks like across the product lifecycle from discovery through live.
• Knowledge of user-centered product development: how research findings from service designers become backlog inputs, how to distinguish what users need from what stakeholders request, and how to maintain that distinction under pressure.
• Knowledge of State government technology context: how Colorado agencies plan, budget, and make technology investment decisions, sufficient to set standards that work inside legislative, procurement, and political constraints.
• Knowledge of tooling ecosystems for product management (e.g., Jira, AirTable, Figma, Miro) and the ability to configure and standardize them across a distributed delivery portfolio.
• Knowledge of career pathway design: what a product management competency framework looks like across levels from entry-level to senior practitioner, and how to build growth paths that don't require leaving the discipline.
• Knowledge of the landscape of government digital delivery practice: familiarity with frameworks and guidance from GDS, 18F, USDS, and peer state digital service organizations that inform what modern product management in government looks like.
• Ability to distinguish craft problems from delivery problems. Know when a PM's backlog is weak because of skill gaps versus structural constraints versus unclear agency priorities, and respond differently to each.
• Ability to hold standards while staying pragmatic. Maintain universal craft expectations while acknowledging that agencies at different maturity levels need different kinds of support. Good standards bend to context without breaking.
• Ability to build a genuine community. Create conditions where PMs across pods feel connected to a discipline, share failures without fear, and invest in each other's growth. This is the kind of professional community that USDR's talent work describes as making government a destination for skilled practitioners.
• Ability to give credible craft feedback to technology directors and product directors who may have no PM background themselves. Make performance advisory useful rather than abstract.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Minimum of five (5) years of experience in product management craft (e.g. standards, tools, and training), which includes working in or leading cross-functional teams using iterative, user-centered methods.
• A track record of working across disciplines — design, engineering, policy, or operations — to ship things that work for real people.
• Additional appropriate education will substitute for the required experience on a year-for-year basis, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.
• Additional, appropriate paid or unpaid experience will substitute for the required education on a year-for-year basis.
• Training or Certification related to the work assigned to the position will be assigned credit towards substitution for experience and/or education, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Relevant certifications such as Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Pragmatic Institute Product Management, or Professional Product Manager (PPM).
• Experience working within a digital service agency or a government-adjacent technology firm, successfully translating mission-driven policy goals into actionable product backlogs.
• Experience in modern procurement practices is highly desirable, with the ability to structure vendor requirements in a way that remains outcome-oriented and agile rather than locking the state into rigid, fixed-scope contracts.
• Background in User-Centered Design (UCD).

Conditions of Employment:

• OIT employees must comply with any screening procedures in place at state entity locations where they might be required to perform work.
• A pre-employment background check will be conducted as part of the selection process.
• Positions supporting some agencies such as the Department of Corrections and the Department of Public Safety will also require a pre-employment drug test.
• This position may require travel within the specified geographic area, and to locations across the state as needed.