Solution Consultant (External Program Manager) - Hybrid

Brief Description Job Type: Direct hire Company: The name of our partner organization will be disclosed during the interview process. This is not a direct role with LaunchCode; it is a position through LaunchCode, working with one of our partner companies. Disclaimer: We are unable to provide work sponsorship for this role. We are unable to consider candidates for this role who have a current or future work sponsorship need (this includes those holding extended OPT Visas). Our company partner is seeking a Solution Consultant, a product manager for their clients’ businesses. You own the "what," the "why," and the business case. For each client in your portfolio, you learn their operation deeply enough to uncover the problems worth solving, quantify the value of solving them, and prioritize the opportunities with the strongest return. You maintain a living roadmap and backlog tied to measurable outcomes, then make clear, evidence-based recommendations that help clients confidently invest in the right work. You translate that direction for our development team with enough context and clarity that they can build it well. You are your clients’ stakeholder, advocate, and champion for value. You’ll do this across several businesses at once, in industries you didn’t know last quarter, for people who own the P&L. You recommend; the client decides. The job is won or lost on the quality of your thinking and your ability to make a case someone will act on. A recommendation nobody adopts is worth nothing here. This is not order-taking. Clients rarely arrive with a well-formed problem statement. They arrive with symptoms, frustrations, spreadsheets held together with tape, and workarounds they stopped noticing years ago. Your job is to be curious enough to find what’s actually underneath — and opinionated enough to tell them what to do about it. Underneath all of it is shared understanding. Custom software development is almost certainly a new process for your client, and it asks them to make consequential decisions about something they can’t see yet. Your job is to take them along — so that they, their users, and our developers are working from the same picture of the problem, the plan, and the trade-offs. We treat this as a first principle: where understanding is genuinely shared, results are predictable and expected. Where it quietly diverges, projects fail. Holding it together is continuous work, not a kickoff meeting. What This Role Owns Continuous discovery. Understand each client’s business, goals, constraints, and context — and keep understanding them. Discovery isn’t a phase you complete; it’s a posture you hold for the life of the relationship. Value identification and prioritization. Sift a large volume of information down to the handful of problems worth solving, and sequence them by the value they release. Confident recommendation. Tell clients what you think they should do next, based on what you’ve learned, whether or not they asked. Roadmap and backlog ownership. Maintain and evolve each client’s roadmap and emerging backlog over time. Surface new opportunities before they’re requested. Shared understanding. Establish and maintain one picture of the problem, the plan, and the trade-offs across the client, their users, and our developers — and keep it current as all three change. Measurable business outcomes. Connect every piece of work back to a business result — hours recovered, margin improved, risk reduced, revenue enabled. What You’ll Do Get curious, and stay curious. Spend real time with clients — their people, their processes, their data, their numbers. Ask better questions than they’ve been asked before. Stick your nose where it wasn’t invited. The best opportunities are almost always adjacent to the thing you were brought in to look at. Learn industries fast. You won’t know logistics, or medical device distribution, or specialty manufacturing before you walk in. You’ll need to learn enough, quickly enough, to give advice a seasoned operator will respect. Translate process into money. Read a P&L. Understand a client’s KPIs and cost drivers. Be able to let the client see the real value of a proposed change. Shape the solution. Work with our developers to pressure-test feasibility, approach, and effort. Know what’s technically expensive and what’s cheap, and steer clients accordingly. Know when the right answer is a small change to an existing system rather than a new build — or nothing at all. Take the client along. Custom development is new territory for most of our clients. Teach them how it actually works — why we iterate, what a change costs and when, why their feedback is worth more in week two than week ten. Make the abstract visible with story maps, prototypes, and demos. Write things down. And test for real understanding rather than accepting the polite nod, because the gap you don’t find now is the one that surfaces at delivery. Get the work built. Translate direction into well-formed epics and stories with clear context, acceptance criteria, and business rationale. Stay with the work through the build so intent doesn’t get lost between the conversation and the code. Advocate internally. Represent your clients in planning, scoping, and prioritization discussions. Make sure what we deliver is what matters to them. Raise the bar. If you come in with more consulting and business maturity than the room, we want you to use it. This seat has room to grow into one that elevates the whole consulting team. What You Need To Bring Deep curiosity. Not professional interest — actual curiosity about how businesses work and why people do things the way they do. Analytical instinct for value. Given a mess of information, you find the thread that matters. You’re comfortable being decisive about what’s not worth doing. Business acumen. Operations, financial concepts, KPIs, process improvement, organizational dynamics. You think like an operator, not a requirements gatherer. Financial literacy. Enough comfort with financial statements and business metrics to reason about margin, cost, and payback without hedging. A drive for shared understanding. You assume you’ve been misunderstood until you’ve confirmed otherwise, and you can tell the difference between agreement and a nod. The confidence to challenge. You’ll tell a client their process is the problem, that the feature they asked for is a bad idea, or that they’re the bottleneck — with enough care that they thank you for it. The ability to make a case. You don’t have authority here. Your leverage is a well-built argument, backed by numbers the client can check, delivered to someone who has other priorities. Client empathy. You can deliver a hard message because people trust that you’re on their side. Adaptability. New industry, new client, new vocabulary, every few months. You find that energizing rather than exhausting. A continuous learning mindset. The half-life of what you know here is short. Qualifications A background in client-facing consulting, solution consulting, business analysis, or product management / product ownership — ideally in a services or agency environment. We’re open on level; we care more about what you can do than how long you’ve been doing it. A track record of translating business needs into requirements a technical team could actually build from Experience facilitating discovery sessions and workshops with stakeholders from frontline users to executives Strong written communication — much of your influence will happen in documents and summaries Technical fluency enough to reason credibly about databases, integrations, APIs, and system boundaries — and to earn developers’ respect. You don’t need to write production code. Helpful, Not Required Exposure to FileMaker, low-code platforms, or custom business application development Integration experience across CRMs, ERPs, and accounting systems Background in one of our core verticals (manufacturing, logistics, professional services, healthcare) Familiarity with EOS or a similar operating framework How We’ll Measure Success First 90 days: You know our delivery model, our tooling, and our team. You’ve shadowed active engagements and taken primary ownership of at least one client relationship. First 6 months: You’re running discovery independently. Every client in your portfolio has a maintained roadmap, and nothing we deliver surprises them. Your clients can articulate the value of the work in flight, and your development team rarely comes back to you for missing context. First 12 months: Your accounts are growing because the work is delivering measurable results, and clients are bringing you problems earlier — before they’ve decided what the answer is. #J-18808-Ljbffr LaunchCode