Overview:
TekWissen is a global workforce management provider headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan that offers strategic talent solutions to our clients world-wide. This client is a German multinational Pharmaceutical and biotechnology company and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, headquartered in Leverkusen, and areas of business include pharmaceuticals; consumer healthcare products, agricultural chemicals, seeds and biotechnology products.
Job Title: Product Manager
Location: Creve Coeur, MO, 63146
Duration: 6 Months
Job Type: Contract
Work Type: Hybrid
Job Description:
Product Managers ensure that products are fulfilling their primary purpose to enable users to perform tasks that create value for the company. Product managers have two broad areas of responsibility:
Setting strategic vision for the product to ensure the customer and their needs are at the center; and ensuring team priorities are supporting business outcomes for customer, product, technical and enabling teams.
This requires continual alignment of the product strategy and objectives with customer, product, technical, and enabling teams
Managing the product backlog, which prioritizes the work of the assigned squads, to achieve the vision and aligned strategy.
To successfully manage these areas of responsibility, product managers must have a deep understanding of the product domain, related technology, and architecture.
Product Managers drive strategy and execution for multiple digital products that largely focus on one technical platform.
Key Responsibilities Outputs
Product Management
The product manager is accountable for the overall success of a product throughout its lifecycle, from conception to decommissioning.
They identify domain needs, develop, and validate product concepts, and build a business case.
They oversee the product's build and launch, including any sourced services; as well as ensure product availability, stability, and compliance needs are met.
Product managers collaborate with various teams, including product development, marketing, finance, legal, manufacturing, operations, and sales, as needed, to ensure cohesive progress and success.
Product Managers drive agile best practices with the team to improve delivery, including continuous planning ahead of each development cycle (e.g. sprint planning) and working together to co-create user stories aligned with the product backlog prioritization.
In addition to guiding the team product managers have duties like market opportunity identification, competitive analysis, sales enablement, or monitoring domain performance.
Stakeholder Engagement
It is vital for the product manager to identify their key stakeholder group.
Though many strong and loud opinions will be expressed, an effective product manager uses discretion to deliver their product in a way that meets the needs of users and stakeholders who will ensure value is realized for the client.
Stakeholders should trust that the product manager not only understands their needs but will actively work to ensure their needs are met while delivering the product.
Product Strategy
The product manager must provide strategic leadership with full end-to-end ownership for their assigned products throughout the entire product lifecycle.
They are responsible for planning and optimizing capabilities to deliver business outcomes in the most efficient way.
Product managers require strong strategic planning, decision making, and influencing skills to balance the needs of users and various stakeholders.
Product Discovery & Delivery
The product manager is responsible for creating comprehensive product roadmaps, to clarify user needs and non-functional requirements.
They provide product oversight by tracking and reporting progress against 90-day outcomes and overall product health (including budget responsibilities).
They also plan and manage product delivery while streamlining the corresponding backlog.
Product managers are responsible for monitoring user feedback and metrics to co-create solutions that drive a better user experience and deliver more business value.
They leverage Design Thinking methodology starting with user needs to prioritize problems and through discovery they perform usability, feasibility, business fit and value testing to determine the optimal solution.
People & Collaboration
Product managers must proactively communicate and collaborate with product users and stakeholders, which requires strong strategic communication skills.
Effective cross-functional collaboration is critical for product managers, bringing together diverse skills and knowledge to deliver a valuable product. It's important to maintain strong and productive working relationships with colleagues in product management, engineering, and other technically focused organizations.
Product managers are also responsible for mentoring more junior product managers to improve product management and agile practices across the community.
Qualifications, Competencies & Skills
Required:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or similar or minimum 4 years equivalent practical experience in addition to:
3 or more years of relevant experience as a product manager
2 or more years of experience with Agile software development and DevOps
Preferred:
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence initiatives that involve cross-functional teams from initiation to delivery
Experience with Design Thinking, user-centered design & user analysis
Ability to establish and manage initiatives against a set of key metrics and goals
Strong analytical, management and organizational skills
Strong verbal and written communication abilities: must effectively communicate with technical and non-technical people
Experience in building product vision, product roadmap, and product strategy
Proven experience in designing, developing, delivering or leading digital solutions
TekWissen Group is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity