Job Summary
The Senior Product Manager title is intended for someone with substantial product experience and an established track record of successful product practices and delivery. The SPM leads multiple product teams or a large product group and is responsible for defining the product strategies and customer outcomes that their product team(s) work to achieve and ensuring that the products delivered meet the needs of GVL customers. Senior Product Managers are expected to demonstrate competencies in the full product lifecycle from discovery to delivery including: customer discovery, product discovery, product evangelism, management of their product(s) including prioritization of work and writing release notes for product releases, and management of relationships with key product stakeholders. SPMs are expected to actively mentor less experienced product managers, and may take up to two product managers as direct reports. Key accountabilities include establishing and tracking business metrics for their products.
Key Responsibilities
- Discovery: Engages internal GVL experts and customers (new or prospective) to gain an understanding of key challenges that represent opportunities for GVL products or solutions. Using this knowledge, the Senior Product Manager collaborates with his or her product team(s) to iteratively define solutions ranging from small feature enhancements to robust solutions.
- Meets with customers to identify customer needs and opportunities; determine product market fit
- Gathers and considers feedback from a range of existing customers to determine whether new enhancements/features/solutions will address their needs
- Meets with customers to validate features and walks through product iterations in the course of development to ensure product development is on track to meet customer needs
- Researches competitive/related solutions; understands the technology landscape
- Works closely with design to make sure features are usable and intuitive for our customers
- Works closely with lead engineer to ensure solution feasibility
- Acquires a deep expertise of their product, their customers, and the related domain(s)
- Documents key use cases and personas to help the team understand the problems
- Creates story maps, roadmaps and other artifacts to provide context and direction to product teams and other stakeholders
- Ensures final product meets customer needs
- Management of Product: Authors and maintains product vision and strategy. Defines priority of outcomes, clarifies customer needs for product team(s), works with engineering to set deadlines for milestones, authors monthly product goals, and acts as a leader on their product team(s).
- Acquires a deep expertise of their product(s) and adjacent products
- Creates and maintains a clear product vision and strategy that helps drive the product forward and supports the broader business goals of GVL
- Partners with lead engineer and UX to scope out solutions and features and establish pathways for team to develop the product
- Establishes success criteria for the product and determines how to measure that criteria
- Ensures final product meets customer needs
- Monitors progress towards product completion for each component and the final product
- Identify potential problems within their product areas, process, or team(s) that arise in their area and resolve or assist in resolving those issues.
- Relationship Management: Manages relationships with their product team, the product management team, marketing, internal stakeholders, sales, strategic partners, customer success, and customers that use or might use their product.
- Ensures that their product team understands the vision and strategy of their product, as well as the short and medium term plans to achieve their vision.
- Collaborates with Product Management to identify areas of possible alignment or collision
- Collaborates with Sales and Marketing to develop a go to market strategy
- Works to inform internal stakeholders of product strategy and goals, understands and considers their input
- Leadership/Mentorship: Manages or mentors less experienced Product Managers. Provides guidance and leadership to other product team members.
- May have one or more product managers as direct reports
- Provides guidance, formally or informally, to others in the Product Management team
Qualifications
- B.A./B.S. degree preferred
- Experience delivering software in an agile development environment using continuous deployment techniques
History of delivery of successful products in a product management role - Experience in managing beta or early adopter programs
Demonstrated competency in product discovery practices - Entrepreneurial interests and experience
- Initiative and ambition
- Intellectual curiosity
- Affinity for technology/software
- Ability to motivate, inspire, and lead by example
- Excellent interpersonal communication and collaboration skills
- Strong negotiator
- Product delivery practices
- Product evangelism and motivational leadership
- Data-driven decision making
- Vision and strategic thinking
- Up to 30% travel, occasionally more during product launches
About GVL
We bring passion and innovation to empower veterinarians to safeguard the health and well-being of animals worldwide.
Our cloud-based platform enables veterinary professionals to quickly create accurate, compliant animal health and movement documentation. As government regulations become more prevalent in the animal health industry, we continue to develop digital solutions that help ease the stress of compliance, while also assisting in disease traceability and data management.
Based in Ames, IA, we provide software to animal health practitioners in the USA and Canada. We believe that all employees contribute to the good of the company, and our core values encourage each employee to be accountable, spirited, inspired, dedicated, and respectful.
GVL has reviewed this job description to ensure that essential functions and basic duties have been included. It is not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all functions, responsibilities, skills and abilities. Additional functions and requirements may be assigned by the supervisor as deemed appropriate.