Director of Product Management
Summary
Directors of Product Management are expected to demonstrate competencies in the full product lifecycle from discovery to delivery including: customer discovery, leadership of the product team, product evangelism, management of their product(s) including prioritization of work and writing release notes for product releases, and management of relationships with key product stakeholders Directors of Product Management may lead multiple product teams, a large product group, or a solution and is responsible for defining the product strategies and customers outcomes that their product team(s) work to achieve and ensuring that the products delivered meet the needs of Workiva customers. This role is also expected to participate in cross-group processes and program development.
Responsibilities
Discovery
- Meets with customers to identify customer needs and opportunities, determine product market fit.
- Works to vet new solution opportunities, assists in identification of new markets and use cases.
- Meets with customers, sometimes highly strategic customers, to validate features and walk through product iterations in the course of development to ensure product development is on track to meet customer needs.
- Occasionally meets with dissatisfied customers to address their concerns.
- Works closely with design to make sure features are usable and intuitive for our customers
- Works closely with engineering to ensure solution feasibility
- Acquires a deep expertise of their product, their customers, and the related domain(s)
- Document key use cases and personas to help the team understand the problems
- Creates story maps, road maps and other artifacts to provide context and direction to product teams and other stakeholders
- Ensures final product meets customer needs
- Researches competitive/related solutions, understands the technology landscape
Management of Product
- Authors and maintains product vision and strategy
- Defines priority of outcomes, clarifies customer needs for product group(s), works with engineering to set deadlines for milestones, authors Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and acts as a leader on their product team(s).
- Pulls together taxonomy groups to align towards common or overlapping goals.
- Acquires a deep expertise of their product(s) and adjacent products.
- Gains an understanding of the entire Wdesk ecosystem.
- Partners with lead engineer and UX designer to scope out solutions and features and establish pathways for team to develop the product
- Establishes success criteria for the product, and works with UX researcher to determine how to measure that criteria.
- Monitors progress towards product completion for each component and the final product
- Ensures final product meets customer needs
- Contributes to the creation of overall product strategy and roadmap in partnership with the Product Manager mentor.
- Identify potential problems within their product areas, process, or teams that arise in their area and drive resolutions for those issues.
- Creates and maintains a clear product vision and strategy that helps drive the product forward and supports the broader business goals of Workiva
Relationship Management
- Manages relationships with their product team, the product management team, product marketing, internal stakeholders, sales, strategic partners, customer success, and customers that use or might use their product.
- Ensures that their product team understands the vision and strategy of their product, as well as the short and medium term plans to achieve their vision.
- Collaborates with the Product Management team to identify areas of possible alignment or collision
- Works to inform internal stakeholders of product strategy and goals, understands and considers their input
- Collaborates with Product Marketing to develop a go to market strategy
Leadership/Mentorship
- Manages or mentors less experienced Product Managers. Provides guidance and leadership to other product team members.
- May have one or more product managers as direct reports
- Provides guidance, formally or informally, to others in the Product Management team
What You'll Need
Skills
- Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills
- Self-motivated with strong propensity for action, results and continuous improvement
- The ability to work successfully in a high-energy, fast paced, rapidly changing environment is necessary
- Exceptional organizational skills with the ability to multi-task and manage multiple processes, programs, and procedures simultaneously while working under pressure to meet deadlines
Experience
- 10+ years related experience.
Education
- B.S./B.A. degree preferred, preferably in computer science, computer engineering, or business
- MBA preferred
Travel Requirement
- Up to 35% when we get back to traveling again
Our values drive how we work and who we hire. You will see these values ingrained in how we support our customers, work with team members, build our products and in the work environment we’ve created.
- Customer Success: Always delight our customers.
- Trust: Rely on each other.
- Integrity: Do the right thing, every time.
- Collaboration: Share resources and work together.
- Innovation: Keep creating solutions and finding better ways.
- Inclusion: Support a diverse community where we all belong.
- Accountability: Be responsible for your success and failure.
We believe our people are our greatest asset, and our unique culture gives employees the opportunity to make an impact everyday. We give our employees the freedom and resources they need—backed by our culture of collaboration and diverse thought—to continue innovating and breaking new ground. We hire talented people with a wide range of skills and experiences who are eager to tackle some of today’s most challenging problems.
At Workiva, you’ll enjoy:
- Fantastic Benefits: With coverage starting day one, choose from competitive health, dental, and vision plans on the largest physician networks available.
- Casual Dress: Workiva has a casual work environment, most people wear jeans to the office.
- Involvement: Ability to participate in Employee Resource Groups, (Women in Tech, Women in Sales, Ethnic Diversity, Veterans, Rainbow (LGBTQ), Remote Employees, Caregiving) Volunteering, Company wide celebrations, and more
- Work-life Balance: We have competitive PTO, VTO and Parental Leave. We encourage employees to spend time enjoying life outside of work.
Learn more: https://www.linkedin.com/company/workiva/life/
Workiva is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. We believe that great minds think differently. We value diversity of backgrounds, beliefs, and interests, and we recognize diversity as an important source of intellectual thought, varied perspective, and innovation. Employment decisions are made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression genetic information, marital status, citizenship status or any other protected characteristic.
Workiva is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. To request assistance with the application process, please email [email protected].
