The ideal candidate will be an experienced Lead Product Manager able to lead the charge on bringing user-driven software enhancements to market with efficiency and aplomb. This person will have deeply-ingrained respect for user experiences and clear strategies for fostering an environment of collaboration. This role is ideal for someone with an entrepreneurial mindset and real-world experience distilling business value and goals into near-term roadmaps and refined product backlogs.
At Diesel Laptops, we believe user experience is king. To that end, we expect the Lead PM to bring to this role a respect and understanding of common UX best practices, curiosity, and laser focus on what’s best for end users. This becomes especially important as we think about leveling up Diesel Laptops to take a dominant market position, as the best UX will almost always win battles for market share.
Diesel Laptops is a relative newcomer to both software and Agile methodologies. So the Lead PM in this role will be a pioneer and evangelist as we evolve our practices, and will pave the way for a growing team and platform over the next few years. This is an exciting opportunity to help mold a practice from the start and infuse it with the principles and practices you espouse.
We’re asking a lot of the person in this role, but we believe it will be rewarding to see this major undertaking come to life. We also offer a high degree of support from your collaborating teammates and expect your efforts to be duly rewarded throughout a successful and productive career with us. When you need resources and help, we will be there to support those needs as best as we can.
Responsibilities:
- Conceptualize, evangelize, articulate, and support delivery of major platformization efforts that touch multiple teams and stakeholders and require their buy-in, while serving our larger strategic goals.
- Thoughtfully plan, present, generate excitement for, and deliver well-curated platform vision and roadmaps.
- Gather data, expert insights, various perspectives, and more to develop a well-defined backlog and roadmap that will increase revenue and user stickiness; measure success with reported KPIs on a quarterly basis.
- Show flexibility and curiosity as you adapt to change when new opportunities or data becomes available while balancing disruption to planned work and delivery team stability.
- Advocate for the best user experiences in roadmap and backlog grooming exercises, requirements definition, and release planning.
- Successfully apply your deep knowledge of Agile software development principles, methodologies, and practices within functioning software engineering teams to ensure delivery goals are regularly achieved. Pioneer and evangelize Agile software delivery practices.
- Succinctly and effectively define user stories, requirements, issue resolution criteria, acceptance criteria, and associated artifacts for steady, predictable, and value-driven Agile software delivery.
- Deliberately plan and manage feature releases to optimize user value and decrease negative impact.
- Continuously manage and groom each development backlog for 2 teams of software engineers such that we remove bottlenecks and blockers to delivery and we have several weeks of work that meets the definition of ready at any given point in time.
- Deploy your strong sense of clarity, purpose, and direction to resolve issues and solve problems with regards to conflicting priorities, urgent needs vs planned work, unclear requirements, cross-team dependencies, etc.
- Collaborate and build trust with internal stakeholders, subject matter experts, UX experts, and engineers.
- Lead through influence to achieve delivery and roadmap goals while focusing on team success rather than individual success.
Remote, hybrid, or in-office (HQ is in Irmo, South Carolina). Full-time. US-based preferred but not 100% necessary (non-US would be brought on as 1099).