"Principal Software Product Manager"

Principal Software Product Manager

Company: Western Governors University

Job Location: Salt Lake City Office

Category: Other IT

Type: Full-Time

Job Type: Full time

Job Number: JR-022745

If you're passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country-and you're committed to working hard to play your part in building that future-consider WGU as the next step in your career.

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.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is: Grade: Technical 412 Pay Range: $175,900.00 - $272,600.00

Job Description

The Principal Software Product Manager is the most senior individual contributor role within the Product organization. They will collaborate with a cross-functional team and product peers to develop strategic product roadmaps that ensure a holistic end-to-end user experience. Working with some of the most challenging problems to solve, they will build business cases, articulate strategy, and evangelize the product vision to stakeholders and cross-functional team members. The Principal Software Product Manager will measure and report on the efficacy of initiatives and develop action plans accordingly. They 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. The work will typically span multiple product domains and requires a high level of collaboration and the ability to make pragmatic decisions while influencing others to support other decisions.

Job Duties

• Owns the most difficult products/strategies that span multiple product domains and requires high levels of coordination and collaboration.
• Works directly with senior and executive leaders to understand their most pressing problems and help them develop the most effective strategy to solve those problems.
• Leads cross-functional Steering Committees to update and track strategy, ensure alignment with business metrics and goals, and communicate the strategic roadmap.
• Works closely with a cross-functional team of stakeholders, end-users, engineers, UX designers, and product leaders to understand the problems to solve, inform the product vision, and define requirements.
• Leads cross-functional collaboration at the senior level to deliver outcomes and is a go-to person for questions and guidance related to product work.
• Designs experiments to test customer tradeoffs - between user experience, technology constraints, and business value.
• Analyzes the impact of their product domain features on key business outcomes.
• Connects domain data to the experience journey and user and business OKRs/KPIs.
• Leads efforts to create shared outcomes across multiple teams to deliver impact for customers.
• Defines product release strategies, ensuring the readiness of the various business partners.
• Becomes the expert for their product, demonstrating mastery of the current platform with an understanding of gaps that inform their near-term product roadmap and contribute to long-term strategy.
• Manages expectations by understanding when initiatives are at risk and proactively communicating with stakeholders.
• Writes business cases and conducts ROI and other value analyses.
• Leads and presents in quarterly planning activities.
• 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.
• Ensures product quality by testing software features to ensure they satisfy the acceptance criteria and work with stakeholders and end users to coordinate user acceptance testing activities.
• Actively mentors and initiates guidance of less-experienced Product Managers through formalized mentorship assignments.
• Leads research efforts to provide clarity from ambiguity and develops data collection strategies that identify the right outcomes for measuring success.
• Uses data in storytelling to influence decisions around the right outcomes to be delivered at the right time.
• Performs other job-related duties as assigned.

KSAs

• Product evangelist internally and externally
• Ability to reimagine a product space and bring it to life
• Understands and guides thinking about monetization of product opportunities
• Ability to evaluate the impact of trade-off decisions to ensure we are delivering the greatest value to the customer at the right time.
• Future-oriented and can articulately paint credible pictures and visions of possibilities and likelihoods
• Ability to coordinate and seek opportunities to align and partner with other product teams throughout the organization.
• Inspires new ways of working and product practices techniques
• Ability to share learned insights and best practices across teams and externally to the product department
• Ability to lead and influence other managers and their staff despite not having direct reports
• Excellent presentation, written, and verbal communication skills to an executive audience
• Strong passion for exploring and understanding customer needs
• Natural leadership instincts, with a positive team building approach
• Breadth and dept in product discovery techniques and knows when to use what

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in a related field
• 10 years of demonstrated experience working as a Software Product Manager, Product Owner, or Group Product Manager, with at least 3 years of those as a Senior or Group Product Manager
• Professional Product Certification (e.g. Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Pragmatic Marketing)
• Experience working in Agile environments
• Experience managing multiple types of problems at the same time
• Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements. Generally, equivalent relevant experience is defined as 1 year of experience for 1 year of education and is the discretion of the hiring manager.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in a related field
• Experience in Education Technology
• Certified in Change Management