TECHNICAL PRODUCT MANAGER
Global Nomads Group (GNG) is preparing a generation of global citizens who are empathetic, aware, and taking action to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. GNG is a nonprofit that leverages technology to give young people the opportunity to connect with peers from around the world – with the ultimate goal of equipping them with the skills they’ll need to successfully navigate distance and difference. Since 1998, Global Nomads Group has reached over 1 million young people on all 7 continents. To learn more, visit: http://gng.org/ .
Join us! We invite you to join us at a pivotal moment in GNG’s 20-year history. The next phase of our ever-evolving organization will see efforts to shape the development of our world-class education products to connect students and educators from around the world.
As Technical Product Manager you will bring engineering, user experience design, and best-of-breed technologies together and play a critical role in leading our product through needs analysis, iterative implementation of solutions, and measuring impact of those solutions as we deliver on our ambitious vision. This role is highly cross-functional and will require a strategic thinker comfortable with (and excited by!) ensuring cross-departmental alignment; building tools, processes and capacity to achieve the organization’s goals. The position will report to the Director of Operations.
Who You Are
You’ve got at least 7 years of experience leading and implementing cross-functional products and programs, ideally with an international or educational focus. Ideally, you’ve worked in international environments, and you speak more than one language.
Speaking of languages, you should be able to work with software engineers in theirs. A working knowledge of at least one server-side programming language is helpful, and being able to code HTML, CSS and some Javascript yourself, even if it’s just to customize a commercial product or to build a wireframe to gather feedback, is especially helpful.
For at least 3 years you’ve been in a product management role with a track record of building, launching, and enhancing web-based systems. As part of this work, you’ve managed a combined product, user experience design, and engineering team spanning multiple time zones. You know from experience what types of functionality are easy to implement and which are harder, and you can communicate as effectively with software developers as you do with business stakeholders. You’ve built and managed against budgets for product build and maintenance phases.
You’ve used a variety of product management tools for building and grooming backlogs, developing wireframes and mockups, gathering user feedback, implementing A/B testing, and analyzing product usage patterns. You know exactly which products you’d implement if you were starting from scratch.
You’ve got experience working with multinational organizations and have handled the unique challenges that come with coordinating international groups. You have a strong, innate focus on user needs, and a well-established customer service mindset.
You have led vendor source and selection efforts, and you have experience combining third-party off-the-shelf solutions with custom software development to create technology products that delight your users.
You’re familiar with the education technology landscape, specifically learning management systems, adaptive learning engines, and game-based learning systems. You have previous experience with data security & privacy issues in education or other fields that have specific data protection requirements, such as healthcare or finance.
You’re a digital native or digital immigrant, familiar and comfortable with youth-oriented social media platforms and apps. You understand how to leverage these tools as inspiration for product and solution design, and you understand how to address technical support needs from students.
Primary Responsibilities
Business Analysis
- Work with the field locations to document the organization’s customer-facing and internal business processes and translate them into technical requirements.
- Identify business processes that would benefit from leveraging technology.
- Research the relevant technology product landscape to identify new capabilities that would benefit the organization.
- Use feedback from the field, including product feedback, support requests, and new requirements to continually refine and improve our product offerings.
Product Implementation
- Research and recommend 3rd party technology products and vendors, negotiate their contracts, and manage their scope of work.
- Function as the liaison between vendors and the organization, working to help them understand the organization’s unique requirements so that their products and services can best support the organization.
- Lead the maintenance of our existing externally-built platform and ensure success for new tools and technologies we launch.
- Define and implement product training and documentation to ensure product adoption.
Support, Measure and Improve
- Evangelize and champion developed solutions across the organization.
- Develop and evangelize KPIs and product success metrics across the organization and implement tools and technologies to measure and report against those metrics.
- Develop reports and dashboards to facilitate program analysis and decision-making, and both internal and external reporting.
- Develop internal and contracted product support mechanisms to ensure that our technology systems are robust, error-free, and well-understood by our end users.
Data Management and Internal
- Work with senior leaders to develop operating and project budgets for product maintenance and improvements.
- Introduce policies, procedures, and standards around technology and data management.
- Champion data quality efforts across the organization.
- Identify, source and manage solutions for Global Nomads Group’s product data sources such as our CRM.
- Identify, source and manage solutions for Global Nomads Group’s supporting technologies like webcast platforms, email, and videoconferencing.
Other tasks as necessary.