Staff Software Product Manager

Staff Software Product Manager

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

Job Profile Summary: The Staff Software Product Manager at WGU is an individual contributor role for an experienced and highly technical product architecture professional. They play a key role in the software development process, bridging the gap between technical expertise and product strategy. They should possess a holistic understanding of both technology and business to lead successful software product initiatives.

You will collaborate with a cross-functional teams, product peers, and enterprise architecture and engineering to develop strategic product roadmaps that ensure a holistic end-to-end user experience. You will build business cases, articulate strategy, and evangelize the product vision to stakeholders and cross-functional team members. You will measure and report on the efficacy of your initiatives and develop action plans accordingly. You will make hard, high-stakes trade-offs between features, choosing those that are most likely to ensure that both business goals and user needs are met.

We look for candidates who can demonstrate a history of delivering outcomes through a partnership with design, engineering, architecture, and the business. Someone who, as an excellent storyteller, can represent the interests of the users they serve and influence teams to generate the outcomes that resolve their most pressing problems. We look for candidates who are collaborative by nature, empathetic to users, and are most likely to garner the trust of the stakeholders they serve.

Job Duties

• Works closely with cross functional team of stakeholders, end-users, engineers, enterprise architects, and product leaders to understand the problems to solve, help drive the product vision and define requirements.
• Plays a key role in the software development process, bridging the gap between technical expertise and product strategy.
• Creates shared outcomes with multiple teams to deliver impact for customers.
• Creates, manages, and regularly presents a strategic roadmap to both stakeholders and delivery teams.
• Defines product release strategies, ensuring the readiness of the various business partners.
• Recognized expert for their product, demonstrating mastery of the current platform with a deep understanding of gaps that inform their near-term product roadmap and helps to establish long-term strategy.
• Manages expectations by understanding when initiatives are at risk and proactively communicates with stakeholders.
• Leads and presents in quarterly planning activities.
• Ensures product quality by testing software features to ensure the satisfy the acceptance criteria and works with stakeholders and end users to coordinate user acceptance testing activities.
• Mentors and guides newer Product Managers.
• Leads research efforts to provide clarity from ambiguity and develops data collection strategies that identify the right outcomes for measuring success.
• Defines a plan for capturing success metrics for their products and projects and consistently monitors the metrics, pivoting when the data suggests a need to do so.
• Writes business cases and conducts ROI and other value analyses.
• Maintains responsibility for managing significant/complex technical projects at this level, involving delegation of work and review of work products.
• Develops technology modernization roadmaps that enable constant iterative improvements that correspond with operational and business requirements of the university.
• Leads key technical projects and programs and may facilitate leadership and development of technical teams.
• Works to influence parties within and outside of the job function at an operational level regarding policies, procedures, and practices.
• Performs other job-related duties as assigned.

KSAs

• Possesses a deep understanding and technical background in Service Oriented Architecture.
• Understands the scope of cloud computing and how to work with software architecture to identify the best practices to deliver high-scale platforms, built for reliability, sustainability, and addressing security vulnerabilities.
• Ability to create design artifacts that provide visual and narrative detail of architectural requirements, decisions, and designs to provide linkage between architecture, engineering, infrastructure, enterprise security, and feature-driven product teams.
• Ability to easily communicate technical issues and business requirements and value-based outcomes that are required to address platform scale specifications.
• Understands and learns the nature of legacy enterprise platform architecture with all of the nuances required to build bridges for future capabilities while maintaining current operational excellence.
• Excellent presentation, written, and verbal communication skills
• Leadership instincts with a positive team building approach
• Strong problem-solving skills to address technical challenges and make critical decisions regarding software architecture and development.
• Ability to think strategically about product architecture, align it with business goals, and make decisions that have long-term impact on product development and success.
• Deep understanding of software architecture principles, design patterns, and best practices
• Knowledge of various programming languages, databases, cloud technologies, and software methodologies
• Ability to communicate with parties within and outside of the university (e.g., customers, vendors, etc.)
• Strong passion for exploring and understanding large scale cloud platform requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree
• 8 years of experience as a Software Product Manager or Product Owner
• Professional Product Certification (e.g., Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Pragmatic Marketing)
• Experience working in agile environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree
• Experience in Education Technology
• Experience in large enterprise platforms and integrations

This position description provides the major duties/responsibilities, requirements and working conditions for the position. It is intended to be an accurate reflection of the current position, however management reserves the right to revise or change as necessary to meet organizational needs. Other responsibilities may be assigned when circumstances require. This position requires occasional travel of up to 20%, including required attendance at designated company summits (typically one to two per year). Additional travel may include conferences, visits to company locations, and other business-related events as needed. Additional travel may be assigned as needed to support business requirements.

Full-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.

How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.

Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at View email address on click.appcast.io.

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.