Principal Product Manager (Pacific/Mountain Time Zone)
Please note: the level of the role will be determined by Nava leadership based on experience and skillset.
Position summary
The Principal Product Manager’s purpose is to work collaboratively with client stakeholders and cross-functional team members to define and execute on the vision and strategy for software products and services. A Principal Product Manager leads teams to iteratively deliver working software that meets user needs and business goals, working collaboratively with designers, engineers, project managers, and stakeholders. Responsibilities include translating user needs and business goals into product requirements, defining user flows and other aspects of system behavior, documenting product specifications, and analyzing product metrics.
What you'll do
Determining user needs and business requirements through stakeholder interviews and user research, often in collaboration with designer/researchers
Defining the product vision, strategy, and roadmap showing how increments of working software will be delivered to achieve business goals
Defining user flows, system behavior, and other product specifications that enable team members to design and build working software
Defining quarterly or program increment goals to establish near- and mid-term milestones for delivering working software
Iterating on the product vision, strategy, and roadmap as the team learns from feedback
Collaborating with stakeholders to understand their goals and constraints, and using this information to determine product priorities
Building and maintaining trust with stakeholders by continuously aligning on a shared vision and set of priorities, and demonstrating how the team is delivering on this vision
Coordinating across teams to implement software according to the roadmap and adapt based on learnings
Breaking software features down into user stories or tasks that can be worked on in a sprint
Collaboratively prioritizing and refining the backlog of user stories and tasks to reflect product priorities
Defining sprint goals; leading and contributing to sprint planning discussions that enable designers and engineers to design and build software features
Ensuring that user stories have clear descriptions and acceptance criteria so that design and engineering tasks can be evaluated for completeness
Reviewing product designs and working software to reflect the desired behavior and performance
Engaging with stakeholders for approval of key decisions about how software products and services will function
Coordinating and communicating decisions with the team and with stakeholders, using evidence gained from research and analysis
Ensuring stakeholders are kept up to date on software implementation progress, blockers, and risks
Ensuring teams with dependencies on each other’s work are coordinating and communicating to deliver features that function as expected
Resolve or escalate blockers that impede successful delivery, involving the team as needed
Defining metrics to be used to track the success of a software product or feature
Collaborating with other teams to obtain data needed for metrics
Monitoring metrics to ensure software features are performing as expected
Using data to inform future decisions about what software features to build or improve upon
Reporting metrics to stakeholders and team members verbally and in writing
Running data queries to obtain the most up to date information about how the product or service is performing
Testing behavior of software that is developed in order to validate that features are implemented as expected
Documenting errors or any other pertinent observations about software functionality and appearance
Performing checks to ensure that software is ready to be launched
Communicating with users about new product features
Updating user-facing documentation about the product
Responding to user questions about the software product or service
Coordinating team response to production incidents that affect the operation of the software product or service
Setting direction across their portfolio and practice
Sharing successes and challenges with Nava colleagues so that product managers can learn from each other’s experience
Conducting interviews and evaluating potential new hires to build Nava teams
Helping to onboard new team members to Nava’s product practice
Coaching and mentoring other product managers
Improving and sustaining Nava’s product management operations
Operating as a Product Management subject matter expert fluidly and with influence across all core practice skills, with deep experience in a key portfolio specialty
Business development: acting as business development leads for their program and portfolio
Business development: acting as a Product Management subject matter expert on proposals for new software development contracts, including participating in market research sessions, proposal writing, and oral interviews
Actively mentoring and coaching cross-functional teammates across their program and portfolio, help them grow their skill sets, and contributing that knowledge back to Nava at large
Required Skills
Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
At least 8-10 years of experience, at least 3 years as a product manager
Experience working with cross-disciplinary product teams to build software
Experience working with scrum or other agile methodologies
Excellent written and verbal communication skill
Strong bias towards action; ability to step up into team gaps and ambiguous situations to create an action plan
An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative, and positive mindset
Compensation
$154,400—$173,700 USD