"Product Manager, Data Solutions"

Overview

The University Data Office at Yale University, led by our new Chief Data Officer (CDO), is on an exciting multi-year journey to transform how data is leveraged across the university as a strategic asset. The newly established University Data Office will play a critical role in promoting the use of data across the university in decision-making, safely utilizing advances in AI, and ensuring the security and privacy of the university’s data. Yale generates a wealth of data from its teaching and research activities, but the effectiveness of utilizing data to make informed decisions is limited today by a fragmented data environment and cross-domain analytics conducted mostly on an ad hoc basis. The University Data Office is developing a cohesive data strategy and architecture for institutional data that will enable integrated insights for the president, provost, deans and other key stakeholders at the university.

As an early hire in the new University Data Office reporting to the CDO, the Product Manager, Data Solutions, will contribute to this transformative initiative to shape the future of data-driven insights at one of the world’s preeminent academic institutions.

In this role, the successful candidate will apply a product management approach to the creation and adoption of data solutions for university leaders. The focus will be on understanding users’ data needs and the context in which the data will be used to drive decision-making, prototyping data reporting solutions to enable iteration on user needs, coordinating with the Senior Architect, Data Solutions (in the University Data Office) and IT teams on the build-out of scalable production-level data solutions, and engaging with users post-release to drive adoption and usage. In addition, the Product Manager will recruit, manage, and develop a small team of high-potential Product Management Fellows, Data Solutions. (Fellow roles are full-time positions for recent Yale graduates with a two-year duration.)

Key responsibilities include but are not limited to:

1. Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to identify and deeply understand user needs across campus, with a particular focus on the needs of academic leaders such as deans, the provost, and president.
2. Prioritize data solution opportunities to match needs, including apps, agents, algorithms, dashboards, datasets, and other analytic tools.
3. Develop the technical requirements and financial business case for new data products. Develop project timelines, milestones and resource requirements for data solution implementation.
4. Apply product management principles to align data solutions with institutional priorities, balancing strategic value and delivery effort.
5. Work with Product Management Fellows to prototype data solutions using tools such as R, Python, Power BI, and Excel, iterating with users and IT for scalability and usability.
6. Collaborate with data stewards and IT to assess data availability across domains (e.g., finance, HR, student, space). Collaborate with the Senior Architect, the Data Governance Program Manager and IT to address data quality issues surfaced through data solution development.
7. Explore external datasets (e.g., Ivy+ benchmarking) to enrich institutional insights in partnership with the Office of Institutional Research.
8. Ensure data solutions meet governance, privacy, and access requirements for diverse user groups. Work with data engineers to ensure solutions are robust, scalable, and maintainable.
9. In collaboration with Product Management Fellows, lead documentation, training, and post-release adoption efforts through hands-on user engagement.

Required Skills and Abilities

1. Experience in product management: user requirement gathering, user experience research, solution design and development, feature prioritization, product delivery, and end user support.
2. Strong understanding of data analysis techniques and tools, including statistics and predictive analytics. Experience with data visualization using tools such as PowerBI and Tableau.
3. Exceptional communication skills, with ability to engage with stakeholders at all levels, understand and translate user needs and process workflows into technical requirements, and ability to communicate complex ideas clearly and persuasively to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
4. Exceptional collaboration skills, with an emphasis on relationship-building. Readiness to lead a small team. Strong organizational and project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and stakeholders.
5. Familiarity with data concepts, including data pipelines/workflows, cloud data warehouse environments, data modeling, and business intelligence tools. Solid understanding of how specific data solutions fit into the overall data ecosystem. (Deep technical data engineering expertise not required.)

Preferred Skills and Abilities

Bachelor’s degree in a related field and two to five years of product management experience in a professional environment, in addition to strong data analysis skills.

Principal Responsibilities

1. Develops the initial project charter and clarify the project scope, requirements, measurable outcomes, and project benefits in collaboration with process owners.
2. Documents the "as is" and "to be" business processes using standard process modeling tools and process improvement methodologies.
3. Decomposes high-level business and user requirements into functional requirements. Manages the development of functional specifications by collaborating with process owners; gathering business requirements; creating functional specifications; and identifying, documenting, and resolving design issues.
4. Represents requirements using alternative views, such as analysis models (diagrams), prototypes, or scenarios. Provides compelling and concise analysis to enable business owners to make well informed decisions regarding options for problem resolution and opportunity realization.
5. Leads requirements analysis and verification, ensuring that requirement statements are complete, consistent, concise, comprehensible, traceable, feasible, unambiguous, and verifiable, and that they conform to standards.
6. Contributes in testing and quality assurance process. Collaborates with developers and end-users to insure that application functionality meets client needs. Tests solutions, problem-solve issues, and coordinate enhancements.
7. Responsible for requirements prioritization and solution risk analysis.
8. Plans and communicates the departmental readiness plan. Supports metrics integration and execution for optimal results.
9. Develops and delivers training to end users.
10. May perform other duties as assigned.

Required Education and Experience

Bachelor’s degree in business, technology or related field. Four years of related experience in analysis of business needs and development of related business systems or an equivalent combination of education and experience.