Description
Senior Product Manager – Platform UI Experience
Ann Arbor, MI
Senior Level
Are you passionate about learning and building amazing products that impact people’s lives? Are you excited to lead and inspire a cross-functional product team to improve the ways people learn and do research?
We are looking for a problem solver to help us create clean, systematic, aesthetically pleasing and on-brand UI and UX that takes our JSTOR platform to the next level!
JSTOR makes knowledge accessible to millions of users globally. Come help ITHAKA expand our mission and be part of a team dedicated to providing affordable access to academic journals, books, images, and primary sources to researchers in 170 countries.
The Role
We are looking for an exceptional Senior Product Manager to join JSTOR’s Product team. You will lead a strategic, cross-functional focused, Agile team responsible for a new design system including reusable UI components for our suite of digital products to set us apart in the market and provide an exceptional experience to our users. You will be the single point-of-contact and overarching owner and leader guiding teams as they create and evolve this system, manage component upkeep, and migrate roll-outs across multiple agile teams.
As Senior Product Manager, you will collaborate with leaders and business stakeholders across the organization to evangelize the vision and strategy for common components, gaining alignment and removing barriers to progress where necessary. The ideal candidate will have a system-thinking mindset and be passionate about delighting our users with well-designed products and consistent User Experience (UX). You’ll develop and refine a thorough understanding of the external landscape and user needs, and apply that understanding to find the best path to improving product/market fit.
You will join an agile end-to-end culture and lead one of our many diverse, durable, and co-located teams. We empower our teams and give them the tools they need to collaborate and create so they can make impactful changes quickly. Our technologies and systems support continuous deployment, advanced metrics, and automated testing, enabling us to rapidly deliver exceptional platform experiences that are constantly improving.
Responsibilities
- Drive adoption of the global design system pattern library and UI component system.
- Build a roadmap for the Design System and shared website components based on platform team needs, site data, brand strategy, customer feedback and partner input in areas that help us scale, differentiate our services, and solve user problems while improving consistency and reliability.
- Evangelize consistent use of the Design System to your partner product managers, engineering teams, and cross-functional service teams across the JSTOR platform, and educate about its capabilities and components as necessary.
- Develop a vision and roadmap of the user experience for consuming text, image, audio and video content on the platform following industry standards.
- Own and evolve a consistent user experience that aligns to the brand across the platform including home page, headers, footers, error pages, Ad servers.
- Model Agile Product Management practices and provide coaching and mentorship across the platform teams.
- Conduct product discovery and solicit feedback to gain a deep understanding of customer experience; identify and fill product gaps and generate new ideas that grow usage, improve customer experience and drive growth.
- Integrate customer insights into the development and prioritization process.
- Set aspiring Objectives and Key Results [OKRs] for your product area and build and maintain a prioritized product backlog that helps you meet your OKRs.
- Drive product ideation with cross-functional teams.
- Translate product vision and strategy into prototypes for user testing.
Experience and Skills
- 8+ years of software product management experience in an agile environment, with a track record of shipping design/UI focused products and enabling technology solutions at scale.
- History of providing strategic insights and translating them into inspiring objectives; history of effectively mentoring and coaching fellow product managers, executives, technologists and designers.
- Ability to lead through influence, set clear OKRs, and drive outcomes for agile teams consisting of designers, front end engineers, quality assurance engineers, and user researchers.
- Previous experience as a lead UX/UI/Product Designer or as a lead developer who worked extensively with front end design teams.
- Passionate about user-centric design (meeting web accessibility standards) and engaging user experiences across a platform; experience building easy-to-use interfaces that unify related websites, components or digital products.
- Excellent analytical skills with demonstrated experience in hypothesis-driven learning and turning data into actionable insights; strong cross-functional partnership experience.
- Superior communication skills with proven ability to navigate a complex organization and generate buy-in for ideas and plans with stakeholders who have varying degrees of technical and design knowledge.
- Experience building, owning, prioritizing and maintaining the product backlog of stories for implementation by agile teams.