About Connect First. Connect First Inc. was founded in 2005 and is a privately held company based in Boulder, Colorado. Geoff Mina and Richard Manulkin founded Connect First as a way to revolutionize the contact center industry around the primary mission of providing exceptional customer experiences and cutting edge technology. Today we have over 500 clients worldwide and boast a 97% customer retention rate. With the energy of a startup, but stability of an established business, Connect First is on a roll and looking for great people to help us reach the next stage of success.

Connect First offers competitive salaries, comprehensive benefits, high matching 401k, wellness benefits, generous Paid Time Off, and a casual yet demanding and fast-paced work environment. Best of all we are a dog friendly company! We find time to get outside and enjoy the best of what Boulder has to offer. Our “pay-for-performance” programs healthily reward rock-star achievements and intellect. We also pay for relevant continuing education, conferences, and skills development.

What it’s like to work with us. To understand who, how and why we work, check out our Development Team’s Statement of Values.

• We are a 13-year-old company with a startup culture. We have all the benefits of financial stability that maturity brings and all the energy of the startup environment. Our customer base is diverse; we aren’t dependent on any single customer.

• No egos allowed. We value strong teamwork and strong collaboration.

• We love agile. We do stand ups, retros, and sprint planning. We value process. We also value keeping that process to a minimum and are always looking for continual improvement.

• Our product is BIG, and there is lots more to come. We have a web component, but that is just the surface of what we do. There is always something new to learn.

• We work from the office. Our team is the entire company, and it’s hard to be a part of a team when the core producers aren’t present in the office. Working from home is the exception and not the rule. Life happens. When the water heater blows and you are waiting for the plumber, or your kid is sick, or there is a freak 6-foot snowstorm, working from home is fine. The rest of the time we’d really like to get to know you.

• We are all invested in the business. Every employee has stock options, and we want you to care about the success of our organization. We practice transparent accounting. We believe the more we all know about the business’ performance, the better we can all perform.

About the role. We have an immediate opportunity for a Product Manager / Owner to join our Boulder, Colorado team. As the Agile Product Manager, you will grow to “own” the vision and roadmap of the Connect First products. Development of this vision will be based on industry experience, customer engagement, understanding of and participation in the strategic goals of the business, development of and strategic engagement with internal and external feedback channels, and close communication with engineering, sales, marketing, customer solutions and implementation teams.

As Product Owner, you will help facilitate the development and maintenance of the prioritized product backlog and work closely with both engineering leadership and development to ensure development tasks are planned appropriately for each agile sprint. During the sprint period, you will act as a resource to the engineering team to help understand the User Stories and their business case / requirements, and you will be a go-to individual to help unblock developers when they have questions pertaining to the needs of the product and company. In addition, you will also be a liaison to other departments, teams, company stakeholders and customers, ensuring they are kept abreast of upcoming changes to the product.

You will report to the Director of Engineering, act as one of several primary subject matter experts to the team and company, and will work closely with and have access to stakeholders, leadership, product designers (UI/UX), engineers and others to both support your work, and help provide continual feedback.  Furthermore, you will be expected to be highly motivated, opinionated, eager, communicative, a leader, a visionary, and experienced at the job to be done.

Internal Responsibilities to Development Team

• If not already, quickly become an industry expert through research, travel to customer locations, communications with existing Subject Matter Experts, discussions with company stakeholders and customers, and transfer of knowledge from existing Product Owner.

• Quickly become a product expert. You will be required to work with our sales-engineering, customer solutions, implementation and engineering teams to discover the full capabilities of our platform and understand the reasoning behind previously made product decisions. In our business, context of the customer and feature-set is key.

• Creates, maintains, prioritizes, and sequences the product backlog based on business value.

• Groom a product roadmap that is 2 - 3 releases out.

• Creates user stories from themes and features granular enough for a single sprint.

• Creates acceptance criteria and the definition of “Ready/Done” for user stories.

• Prioritizes user stories by business value.

• Decides which user stories are prioritized into sprints.

• Provides day-to-day rapid feedback and quick decisions to product-level questions and defect triage.

• Participates in project planning, reviews, retrospectives, sprint and release planning, demos and other Scrum-related meetings.

• Reviews deliverable and demonstrable code after every sprint and has the authority to accept or reject user stories.

• Assists with prioritization of defects / bugs resolution.

• Be a conduit between the Agile Team and the Business to eliminate interruptions.

• Serve as Subject Matter Expert (SME) and coordinate access to other SME’s for the Agile Team.

• Help facilitate and promote the Agile Scrum process and associated activities.

External Responsibilities to Company Stakeholders, Customers and End-Users.

• Develop internal and external feedback channels and cycles to help promote early feedback on new product development, and gain insight into market and customer demands.

• Champion and drive the vision of the product based on feature requests, feedback cycles, sales, marketing, company strategy, engineering capabilities, and industry / product expertise.

• Work closely with Customer Success team to drive utilization, success metrics and gather new feature ideas and requirements.

• Work closely with the Marketing department to ensure product messaging meets the criteria for the ideal customer.

• Develop the short, mid and long term product roadmap that keeps the Connect First product portfolio competitive within the contact center space.

• Be an outgoing, informative wealth of information for all members of the company.

• Manage stakeholder needs and requests while balancing product roadmap priorities.

Qualifications

• 3-5 yrs Previous professional experience as a Product Manager or Product Owner.

• Excellent organizational, facilitation, and written/verbal communication skills.

• Self-motivation with strong, proven, analytical and problem-solving skills.

• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional resources and work well in a distributed environment.

• Demonstrated understanding of and experience using Agile processes and methodologies.

• Ability to plan for future work while maintaining the current delivery with rapidly changing priorities.

• Excellent oral and written communication skills.

• Strong influencing skills with ability to influence all executives who are not direct reports.

• Previous experience with project teams.

• Strong presentation skills.
   

Additional skills or background we would be thrilled if you had any experience with:

• Call Center industry or telecommunication experience.

• Agile Product Owner / Product Manager certifications.

• Product management experience for a SaaS company or product.

Application process. Please apply by sending your resume and a cover letter. In your cover letter please tell us: Your favorite or most satisfying experience executing a product roadmap strategy to completion. This can be short and sweet. Submissions without this simple little anecdote will be passed to the back.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The Connect First Crew

Connect First is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, gender, gender identity, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status.