Product Manager (Chicago)

About the Company

Our client is an established consumer lending company with offices in the Loop, a few blocks from both LaSalle Street Station and Union Station, with most CTA lines within walking distance. In the Financial Services space, they are currently expanding into new states. The internal development team has real longevity, including two senior developers who have been with the company for eight years and are treated as full members of the team. This is a direct hire role on a team where people stay.

About the Role

You will be paired with one or more business departments and own the pipeline of work from idea through monitored release. That means acting as a sounding board, shaping opportunities into scoped initiatives, and staying accountable through launch. The work is hands on. You will write the specs, do the analysis, work directly in the data, and learn the systems well enough to catch a flawed design before it gets built.

Hybrid schedule with two days onsite, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What You'll Do

• Learn your department's goals, processes, and data well enough to pressure test proposals and raise concerns before decisions are finalized
• Bring opportunities to the business as well as receive them, including manual work that should be automated, redundant systems that should be retired, and metrics nobody is watching
• Shape those opportunities into initiatives with a defined problem, an expected outcome, and a measurable result
• Own intake, definition, and sequencing of your department's work with the development teams
• Write specifications and tickets any available engineer can build from, and break large efforts into pieces that can ship independently
• Keep backlogs and roadmaps accurate, and drive committed work to closure
• Coordinate the departments a project depends on and hold the dependencies and sign offs, including design and launch of regulated changes
• Define and track key metrics, and use data to tell a story business teams can act on
• Build the dashboards, automated checks, and alerting that keep a release healthy
• Keep leadership current on progress and risk, and own your department's contribution to quarterly planning
• Work in two week sprints with standups roughly twice a week alongside an established 12 person development team

What We're Looking For

• Product management experience in a software driven environment, typically three to seven years
• Strong strategic thinking and high level judgment. This is a strategy role rather than a project coordination role
• An engineering style ability to take a complex, ambiguous problem and break it into its component parts
• Strong reasoning skills and comfort working with abstract concepts
• Proficiency in Excel, and the ability to build a narrative from data that supports a decision
• Experience working closely with development teams, including technical design and writing specifications engineers can build from without extensive clarification
• Clear communication with business leaders and engineers alike, and the ability to lead cross functional work without formal authority
• A track record of owning work through completion in fast moving environments, without management follow up
• Natural curiosity and the confidence to challenge assumptions and bring new ideas forward

Nice to Have

• SQL, Python, or R at a level that lets you answer your own questions and check someone else's analysis
• Background in software development or engineering
• Experience in consumer lending, financial services, or another regulated industry
• Familiarity with Jira and Confluence
• Vendor or third party integration experience from evaluation through launch

MMD Services Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants are considered for all positions without regard to race, religion, color, sex, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, national origin, ancestry, physical/mental disability, medical condition, military/veteran status, genetic information, marital status, ethnicity, alienage or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.