Enterprise Practice Lead (Product Management) (Remote from anywhere in CO)

The State of Colorado’s Governor’s Office of Information Technology is hiring an Enterprise Practice Lead to strengthen product management practice across its teams. The role establishes standards, tools, training, career pathways, and a community of practice, and advises leaders on product craft and practitioner development.

Responsibilities:

• Define and maintain backlog standards, story-writing conventions, prioritization frameworks, and planning cadence expectations that apply across all pods, grounded in outcome orientation, not activity tracking
• Establish tooling standards: which tools to use, how they’re configured, and what consistency looks like across the portfolio without locking teams into configurations that don’t serve their context. Lean in on AI
• Translate Enterprise Architecture (EA) product principles into practical guidance that can apply in their specific agency contexts without needing to interpret enterprise strategy themselves
• Identify patterns of  practice weakness across the portfolio: backlogs driven by stakeholder requests rather than user needs, prioritization that is implicit rather than documented, and product ownership effectively outsourced to a vendor. Design systemic responses to each pattern
• Develop the guild’s equivalent of 18F’s product framing discipline: shared tools like problem statements, product vision documents, and success metric frameworks that everyone can use to ground their work in outcomes
• Design and run a community of practice: regular convenings, peer critique, shared retrospectives, and the informal culture of a discipline that takes its craft seriously
• Develop training programs that build capability statewide through ongoing investment in modern product practice rather than one-time workshops, including the transition from requirements-gatherer to outcome-owner that many governments need to make
• Build and maintain a career pathway and competency framework that creates legible growth from early-career  through senior practitioner, drawing on GDS’s Digital and Data Capability Framework as a reference point
• Create resources that across pods can actually use rather than re-invent, such as templates, playbooks, and examples of strong backlogs and prioritization rationale
• Advise DoTs on  professional development needs and craft performance: what good looks like at a given level, how to give meaningful feedback , and how to recognize when a backlog problem is a skill gap versus a structural or stakeholder-management problem
• Flag systemic craft problems: patterns of weakness across multiple PMs that indicate a training or standards gap rather than individual performance issues
• Provide credible craft feedback to DoTs and product directors who may have no PM background, in a way that is useful rather than abstract

Requirements:

• Knowledge of product management at a deep practitioner level: backlog ownership, prioritization frameworks (value vs. effort, now/next/later, RICE), outcome-based roadmapping, OKR development, and what it means to govern a product rather than a project
• Knowledge of Agile and iterative delivery: how sprint planning, refinement, reviews, and retrospectives work, and what good participation in each looks like across the product lifecycle from discovery through live
• Knowledge of user-centered product development: how research findings from service designers become backlog inputs, how to distinguish what users need from what stakeholders request, and how to maintain that distinction under pressure
• Knowledge of State government technology context: how Colorado agencies plan, budget, and make technology investment decisions, sufficient to set standards that work inside legislative, procurement, and political constraints
• Knowledge of tooling ecosystems for product management (e.g. Jira, AirTable, Figma, Miro) and the ability to configure and standardize them across a distributed delivery portfolio
• Knowledge of career pathway design: what a product management competency framework looks like across levels from entry-level to senior practitioner, and how to build growth paths that don't require leaving the discipline
• Knowledge of the landscape of government digital delivery practice: familiarity with frameworks and guidance from GDS, 18F, USDS, and peer state digital service organizations that inform what modern product management in government looks like
• Ability to lead without management authority. Standards adoption happens because PMs find the guild's guidance useful, not because the Enterprise Lead has a reporting line over them
• Ability to distinguish craft problems from delivery problems. Know when a PM's backlog is weak because of skill gaps versus structural constraints versus unclear agency priorities, and respond differently to each
• Ability to hold standards while staying pragmatic. Maintain universal craft expectations while acknowledging that agencies at different maturity levels need different kinds of support. Good standards bend to context without breaking
• Ability to build a genuine community. Create conditions where PMs across pods feel connected to a discipline, share failures without fear, and invest in each other's growth. This is the kind of professional community that USDR's talent work describes as making government a destination for skilled practitioners
• Ability to give credible craft feedback to DoTs and product directors who may have no PM background themselves. Make performance advisory useful rather than abstract
• A minimum of five (5) years of experience in product management craft (e.g. standards, tools, and training), which includes working in or leading cross-functional teams using iterative, user-centered methods
• A track record of working across disciplines — design, engineering, policy, or operations — to ship things that work for real people
• Relevant certifications such as Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Pragmatic Institute Product Management, or Professional Product Manager (PPM)
• Experience working within a digital service agency or a government-adjacent technology firm, successfully translating mission-driven policy goals into actionable product backlogs
• Experience in modern procurement practices is highly desirable, with the ability to structure vendor requirements in a way that remains outcome-oriented and agile rather than locking the state into rigid, fixed-scope contracts
• Background in User-Centered Design (UCD)