Senior Software Product Manager

Overview

If you're passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country-and you're committed to working hard to play your part in building that future-consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:

Grade:
Technical 410
Pay Range: $ - $

Senior Software Product Manager is an individual contributor role for experienced product individuals who are passionate about delighting users while delivering value to the business. You will collaborate with a cross-functional team and product peers to develop strategic product roadmaps that ensure a holistic end-to-end user experience. You will build business cases, articulate strategy, and evangelize the product vision to stakeholders and cross-functional team members.

You will measure and report on the efficacy of your initiatives and develop action plans accordingly. You will make hard, high-stakes trade-offs between features, choosing those that are most likely to ensure that both business goals and user needs are met.

We look for candidates who can demonstrate a history of delivering outcomes through a partnership with design, engineering and the business. Someone who, as an excellent storyteller, can represent the interests of the users they serve and influence teams to generate the outcomes that resolve their most pressing problems. We look for candidates who are collaborative by nature, empathetic to users, and are most likely to garner the trust of the stakeholders they serve.

• Works closely with 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.
• Works toward creating shared outcomes with multiple teams to deliver impact for customers.
• Defines product release strategies, ensuring the readiness of the various business partners.
• Becomes the expert of their product, demonstrating mastery of the current platform including success metrics, product health, leading and lagging indicators, and enterprise data, with an understanding of gaps that inform their near-term product roadmap and contribute to long-term strategy.
• Creates, manages, and regularly presents a strategic roadmap to both stakeholders and delivery teams.
• Manages expectations by understanding when initiatives are at risk and proactively communicates with stakeholders.
• Participates and presents in planning activities within their scope of work.
• Gathers feedback about the product capabilities needed using interviews, conducting focus groups, instrumenting surveys, partnering with UX on usability sessions, reviewing online communities and working with internal tech teams.
• Participates in and sometimes leads the RFI and RFP vendor selection process.
• Ensures product quality by testing software features to ensure they satisfy the acceptance criteria and works with stakeholders and end users to coordinate user acceptance testing activities.
• Builds mentorship relationships and initiates guidance of less senior Product Managers.
• Effectively uses data and insights provided by researchers and analysts to distill clarity from ambiguity and guide decisions regarding outcome selection and prioritization.
• Provides strategic direction to less senior product managers who lead delivery on Scrum teams.
• Acts as Product Lead on one or more projects.
• Understands and can communicate the impact of their product on the platform and overall business.
• Makes priority decisions that reflect an understanding of business goals, market demand, and user needs.
• Constantly evaluates the impact of trade-off decisions to ensure we are delivering the greatest value to users.
• Clearly articulates their product's strategy and communicates why we are focusing on certain areas and not on others.
• Crafts business cases, ROI analyses, epics, stories, and manages prioritization across large projects and small/medium programs.
• Performs other job-related duties as…