Senior Software Product Manager

About the position

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.

Responsibilities

• Works closely with 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.
• Works toward creating shared outcomes with multiple teams to deliver impact for customers.
• Defines product release strategies, ensuring the readiness of the various business partners.
• Becomes the expert of their product, demonstrating mastery of the current platform including success metrics, product health, leading and lagging indicators, and enterprise data.
• Creates, manages, and regularly presents a strategic roadmap to both stakeholders and delivery teams.
• Manages expectations by understanding when initiatives are at risk and proactively communicates with stakeholders.
• Participates and presents in planning activities within their scope of work.
• Gathers feedback about the product capabilities needed using interviews, conducting focus groups, instrumenting surveys, partnering with UX on usability sessions, reviewing online communities and working with internal tech teams.
• Participates in and sometimes leads the RFI and RFP vendor selection process.
• Ensures product quality by testing software features to ensure they satisfy the acceptance criteria and works with stakeholders and end users to coordinate user acceptance testing activities.
• Builds mentorship relationships and initiates guidance of less senior Product Managers.
• Effectively uses data and insights provided by researchers and analysts to distill clarity from ambiguity and guide decisions regarding outcome selection and prioritization.
• Provides strategic direction to less senior product managers who lead delivery on Scrum teams.
• Acts as Product Lead on one or more projects.
• Understands and can communicate the impact of their product on the platform and overall business.
• Makes priority decisions that reflect an understanding of business goals, market demand, and user needs.
• Constantly evaluates the impact of trade-off decisions to ensure we are delivering the greatest value to users.
• Clearly articulates their product’s strategy and communicates why we are focusing on certain areas and not on others.
• Crafts business cases, ROI analyses, epics, stories, and manages prioritization across large projects and small/medium programs.
• Performs other job-related duties as assigned.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree
• 7 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
• Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements.

Nice-to-haves

• Master's Degree
• Experience in Education Technology

Benefits

• 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
• 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
• Other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave