Product Manager

The Product Manager role provides the deep product expertise needed to lead the organization and make strategic product decisions. The Product Manager spans many activities, from strategic to tactical. They will provide important cross-functional leadership, sitting at the intersection between technology, design, and business to guide teams toward a shared end goal.

This is a full-time position that will allow the successful candidate to work remotely or hybrid in Kansas City, MO.

Responsibilities include:

• Develop a deep understanding of customer needs by conducting thorough market research and customer interviews to identify problems products can solve.
• Distills customer and market needs into product vision statements. Gains alignment and buy-in from key stakeholders on product vision.
• Creates the product strategy and an actionable plan for reaching the product vision. This includes a product roadmap of incremental improvements and iterative development leading to that final vision.
• Evangelizes the product vision, strategy, and roadmap. Gets every team member, from customer-facing to developer, to understand the vision and be passionate about it.
• Owns the organization's idea management process and determines which ideas should be promoted into features to push the product strategy forward.
• Generates business cases to document the justification of ideas and use for idea review and evaluation (i.e., approval).
• Communicates the status of ideas back to the customers, partners, and internal team members who submitted them.
• Coordinates all the activities required to bring new functionality to market through application releases. This involves bridging gaps between different functions within the company and aligning key teams namely engineering, marketing, operations, and customer support.
• Prioritize features by ranking them against the strategic goals and initiatives.
• Make difficult trade-off decisions based on the value new features will deliver to your customers and to the business.
• Defines the requirements for each feature and the desired user experience. Works closely with software engineering on the technical specifications and ensures that teams have all the information they need to deliver a complete product to market.
• Assimilates information: feedback from clients, quantitative data from web analytics, research reports, market trends, and statistics to groom the product roadmap consistently.
• Fills the product owner role for Agile Development teams, closely managing scope to get the product releases out on time.
• Looks at how customers use the product to validate the releases, to solve the right problem, and how users value the product.
• Participate in strategic planning at the department level and directly contribute to the division level.
• Assists with the development preparation and conscientious administration of the department s annual budget, including monthly variance reporting.
• Responsible for approval of expenditures guidelines.
• Manages multiple projects concurrently, which may entail coordinating the daily work of more than one team.
• Other duties may be assigned.

Skills and Abilities:

• Empathetic: understands what users need, and issues teammates face
• Execution-oriented, highly organized, and comfortable managing many work streams
• Collaborates well with all kinds of personalities
• Data-driven; understands how to use data to guide product decisions
• Strong communication skills with effectiveness in making a case through writing, speaking, or both.
• Strong presentation skills
• Ability to perform comfortably in a fast-paced, deadline-oriented work environment
• Extensive experience in agile development best practices
• Extensive experience with application development concepts and the software development life cycle (SDLC).
• In-depth knowledge of project management techniques and reporting
• Experience and proficiency in presenting to senior leadership up to Director level

Minimum education and/or experience required:
5+ years Product Management experience or equivalent.
Preferred Experience:
Product Manager or Product Owner certification.