Head of Product Innovation

About Agile Defense
At Agile Defense we know that action defines the outcome and new challenges require new solutions. Our vision is to bring adaptive innovation to support our nation's most important missions through the seamless integration of advanced technologies, elite minds, and unparalleled agility-leveraging a foundation of speed, flexibility, and ingenuity to strengthen and protect our nation's vital interests.
Location: On-Site, Washington, DC
Clearance Level: DHS Suitability / EOD, Yes - Must Have Clearance to Start

At Agile Defense, we know that action defines the outcome and new challenges require new solutions. Agile Defense is seeking a Product Manager to support a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) U.Customs and Border Protection (CBP) program delivering mission-critical digital capabilities. As Product Manager, you will work at the intersection of mission needs, user experience, technology, and delivery. You will partner closely with UX practitioners, engineers, technical leads, program leadership, and customer stakeholders to turn broad needs into clear product goals and manageable increments of work.
You will also bring practical Agile experience, helping the team maintain a healthy backlog, facilitating planning and collaboration when needed, surfacing blockers, and keeping delivery connected to customer and user outcomes.
As an Agile Defense employee, you will receive a benefits package that includes health, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) with company match, paid time off, paid holidays, and annual tuition and training assistance.
Partner with UX practitioners to conduct discovery activities such as interviews, workshops, observation, journey mapping, and usability research.
Help the team distinguish between requested features and the underlying problems users and stakeholders are trying to solve.
Translate research, customer input, operational needs, and program priorities into clear product goals and requirements.
Develop, prioritize, and maintain a product backlog that connects individual work items to customer needs and product outcomes.
Work with UX and technical leads to break complex problems into smaller increments that can be designed, built, tested, and evaluated.
Make day-to-day prioritization decisions based on customer value, user needs, technical dependencies, risk, and available capacity.
Making Work closely with UX, engineering, architecture, security, and other technical disciplines throughout discovery and delivery.
Ensure user research and usability findings influence product priorities rather than treating UX as a separate activity.
Facilitate collaborative sessions that help the team explore alternatives, challenge assumptions, and reach decisions.
Use prototypes, demonstrations, experiments, or other lightweight methods to test important assumptions before committing significant development effort.
Objective 4: Enable Effective Agile Team Delivery
~ High School diploma or equivalent required

Experience managing or contributing to the delivery of complex digital products or services.
Experience applying human-centered or design-thinking approaches to product discovery, problem framing, and solution development.
Ability to move comfortably between customer discovery, product strategy, team facilitation, and delivery without losing focus on the problem being solved.
Experience translating customer and user needs into product requirements, prioritized backlogs, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Experience working closely with UX, engineering, architecture, security, or other technical disciplines throughout product delivery.
Experience facilitating Agile team activities such as backlog refinement, sprint planning, retrospectives, reviews, or similar collaborative planning sessions.
Working knowledge of Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or related Agile delivery approaches.
Ability to identify and communicate product risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, and unresolved decisions.
Experience using product and Agile delivery tools such as Jira and Confluence or comparable platforms.
Product Owner, Scrum Master, SAFe, or comparable Agile certification or experience.
Experience designing or delivering data-intensive, workflow-heavy, or mission-critical applications.
Experience working with user research and usability testing as part of an iterative product development process.
Office Environment
$In addition, Agile Defense invests in its employees beyond just compensation. Agile's benefits offerings include, dependent upon position, Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, Holiday Pay, short-term and long-term Disability, Retirement and Learning and Development opportunities as well as other optional benefit elections.
Employees of Agile Defense are our number one priority, and the importance we place on our culture here is fundamental. Agile Defense has been highly successful in the past few years due to our employees and the culture we create together.

What makes us Agile? Being helpful is the foundation of teamwork, resulting in a supportive atmosphere where collaboration flourishes, and collective success is celebrated.
Honesty serves as our compass, ensuring transparent communication and ethical conduct, essential to who we are and the complex domains we support.
Success is not achieved alone, humility ensures a culture of mutual respect, encouraging open communication, and a willingness to learn from one another and take on any task.
Our hunger for excellence drives an insatiable appetite for innovation and continuous improvement, propelling us forward in the face of new and unprecedented challenges.
Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.