Product Manager-VMware Pivotal Labs

Ready to build? So are we. Come join VMware’s new and exciting Modern Applications Platform Business Unit (MAPBU) team, made up of products and services under the Tanzu portfolio to help customers build, run and manage their most important applications. To learn more about Tanzu watch this video. #TeamTanzu

You
You have strong product instincts, and an appreciation for and understanding of lean startup, agile and user-centered design values, principles, and practices. You are excited by the mission and organizational value that technology can unlock. You thrive in a complex ecosystem, collecting, sharing, and synthesizing input from many directions and enabling the organization to continuously deliver customer value. You love building effective teams and driving excellence in practice. You are inspired by the opportunity to help customers and partners modernize their in-house software development capabilities. You bring humility, empathy, and a learning mindset to everything you do. You believe in doing the right thing and doing what works.

What you’ll be doing

You will be working on the VMware Pivotal Labs Mountain-West Services team, helping our enterprise customers design and deliver modern, cloud-native applications serving a variety of business and user needs. As a “Labs” Product Manager, you will cross the boundaries between organizational levels, alternately coaching  product managers in lean product development methodologies and approaches and working with leaders of growing software practices on organizational scaling, metrics, and developing a healthy, sustainable product management practice.

All of our product team positions are highly collaborative consulting roles, with 85-90% of time spent in direct, 1:1 pairing or larger team collaboration. During the COVID-19 crisis, this collaboration is all managed remotely.

You will be responsible for

  • Working with your client to define and drive product strategy, identifying key outcomes and success metrics
  • Working with the team to discover customer problems and create valuable, desirable and feasible solutions
  • Working with developers and designers to define and prioritize a backlog for your product that continuously delivers measurable value towards the vision
  • Helping leaders on the client side to innovate and iterate on lean/agile product management processes and build a healthy practice
  • Bringing clarity where there is uncertainty and identifying and managing risk
  • Identifying critical assumptions, defining experiments, measuring success metrics, and using data to inform decisions at both the product and the organizational levels
  • Teaching your client pair how to do all of these things for themselves

Required Skills & Experience:

  • 5+ years Product Management or similar experience, shipping products to users (enterprise products preferred)
  • Experience navigating large organizations and an understanding of complex stakeholder relationships
  • Experience shipping successful products, including defining vision, strategy, outcome-driven product roadmaps and creating and managing backlogs
  • Able to break down complex problems into actionable steps with measurable outcomes
  • Interest and ability to teach others
  • Experience with Lean Product Management and User-Centered
  • Design methodologies
  • Experience with agile development methodology, ideally
  • Extreme Programming
  • Ability to facilitate collaborative decision-making in a workshop context
  • Ability to quickly understand a specific client domain and identify the trends and opportunities in that space
  • Experience closely collaborating with engineers and designers as part of small co-located teams
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills and ability to adapt your communication style for the audience
  • Comfort with ambiguity. We work in an iterative and incremental way, balancing many different inputs and constantly making trade-offs
  • Willing to travel up to 30%

This position may perform work that the U.S. government has specified can only be performed by a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and therefore any offer will be contingent upon verification of both of these requirements​.

 

What’s it like to work at VMware
We believe that teams should spend more of their time delivering incremental value and less on building infrastructure.  We’re building platforms, tools, and automation, including Tanzu Application Service, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Mission Control, to enable our customers to easily and confidently develop and run the software that powers their organization. Hundreds of companies and government agencies rely on our platform to meet the needs of millions of their customers. Our engineers embrace Extreme Programming (XP) as a way to go fast forever and deliver remarkable results. Our product managers and product designers work side-by-side with our engineers in small, empowered teams, using Lean and UCD as guides. We measure success by making our customers more productive, as software developers, product managers, and product designers. We enable our customers to build high quality products to serve the people of the United States.

Our Principles

  • Empower Teams – Diverse teams with shared context, psychological safety, and decision-making authority move faster.
  • Start Simple – Learn just enough to begin and let the work inform the direction.
  • Embrace Change – Expect change and turn it into opportunity.
  • Deliver Early and Often – Ship value to users and measure impact to lower risk.
  • Improve Continuously – We are always learning and humbled by what we don’t know.
  • Contribute to Open Source Communities – Share our time, tools, and methodologies to maximize our impact.

 

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

VMware is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, age, physical, mental or sensory disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, HIV status, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status including pregnancy, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate.  VMware will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics.