Principal Software Product Manager (overlap)

Western Governors University is committed to expanding access to higher education through innovative online programs. The Principal Software Product Manager will lead cross-functional teams to develop strategic product roadmaps and ensure a seamless user experience, while managing complex product strategies and collaborating with stakeholders to meet business goals.

Responsibilities:

• Owns the most difficult products/strategies that span multiple product domains and requires high levels of coordination and collaboration
• Works directly with senior and executive leaders to understand their most pressing problems and help them develop the most effective strategy to solve those problems
• Leads cross-functional Steering Committees to update and track strategy, ensure alignment with business metrics and goals, and communicate the strategic roadmap
• Works closely with a 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
• Leads cross-functional collaboration at the senior level to deliver outcomes and is a go-to person for questions and guidance related to product work
• Designs experiments to test customer tradeoffs – between user experience, technology constraints, and business value
• Analyzes the impact of their product domain features on key business outcomes
• Connects domain data to the experience journey and user and business OKRs/KPIs
• Leads efforts to create shared outcomes across multiple teams to deliver impact for customers
• Defines product release strategies, ensuring the readiness of the various business partners
• Becomes the expert for their product, demonstrating mastery of the current platform with an understanding of gaps that inform their near-term product roadmap and contribute to long-term strategy
• Manages expectations by understanding when initiatives are at risk and proactively communicating with stakeholders
• Writes business cases and conducts ROI and other value analyses
• Leads and presents in quarterly planning activities
• Defines a plan for capturing success metrics for their products and projects and consistently monitors the metrics, pivoting when the data suggests a need to do so
• Ensures product quality by testing software features to ensure they satisfy the acceptance criteria and work with stakeholders and end users to coordinate user acceptance testing activities
• Actively mentors and initiates guidance of less-experienced Product Managers through formalized mentorship assignments
• Leads research efforts to provide clarity from ambiguity and develops data collection strategies that identify the right outcomes for measuring success
• Uses data in storytelling to influence decisions around the right outcomes to be delivered at the right time
• Performs other job-related duties as assigned

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in a related field
• 10 years of demonstrated experience working as a Software Product Manager, Product Owner, or Group Product Manager, with at least 3 years of those as a Senior or Group Product Manager
• Professional Product Certification (e.g. Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Pragmatic Marketing)
• Deep Experience in the ServiceNow platform; technical expertise in preferred but not required
• Experience working in Agile environments
• Experience using AI practices & tools for end-to-end product delivery
• Experience managing multiple types of problems at the same time
• Product evangelist internally and externally
• Ability to reimagine a product space and bring it to life
• Understands and guides thinking about monetization of product opportunities
• Ability to evaluate the impact of trade-off decisions to ensure we are delivering the greatest value to the customer at the right time
• Future-oriented and can articulately paint credible pictures and visions of possibilities and likelihoods
• Ability to coordinate and seek opportunities to align and partner with other product teams throughout the organization
• Inspires new ways of working and product practices techniques, including usage of AI processes and tools
• Ability to share learned insights and best practices across teams and externally to the product department
• Ability to lead and influence other managers and their staff despite not having direct reports
• Excellent presentation, written, and verbal communication skills to an executive audience
• Strong passion for exploring and understanding customer needs
• Natural leadership instincts, with a positive team building approach
• Breadth and dept in product discovery techniques and knows when to use what
• Master's degree in a related field
• Experience in Education Technology
• Certified in Change Management