Director Product Management

Full-Time Chicago, IL Closes: 2020-06-30

A Global Leader in Business Events

PCMA is the world’s largest and most forward-thinking community for Business Events Strategists and organizers, providing senior-level education, networking and market intelligence for the global business events industry.

Our vision is to drive global economic and social transformation through business events.

We are achievers with a mission to educate & inspire more than 7,000 members and an audience of more than 50,000 individuals through the creation of meaningful experiences that set out to disrupt “thinking” at the intersection of social consciousness and commerce.

Headquartered in Chicago, PCMA world class management team oversees 17 chapters throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico with members in more than 40 countries globally – and growing!

We hire ambitious, capable professionals who thrive on entrepreneurial spirit, collaboration and who what to “Change the Way the World Works”. Our people are passionate about progress, welcome constant change and understand the value of engagement and success. We love coming to work because we believe in our products, services and our culture.

A Pivotal Time of Change

PCMA is at a pivotal moment of digital transformation, accelerated by the impacts of COVID-19 including designing digital content and experiences, shifts to remote workforce, and building a data-driven, audience-centric culture within the organization and industry.  This transformation and current realities surrounding COVID reinforces our need for a “New Now” and focus on Purpose, Community, and Value Creation in the business events industry.  This requires reimagined thinking, reimagined business models, and reimagined talent building and structures.

The Product Development “Organization”

The Product Development “Organization” is a reimagined team combining existing talent from Education, with new talent development in research, product development, and human-centric design.  Our goal is to build knowledge, capability, and commerce of audiences through viable products and drive transformative growth through business “event” experiences — gathering of people with shared interest, and meeting them in the mediums where they live.

The Director, Product Management Role

The Product Management role is a newly created position that will play a key leadership role in PCMA’s Product Development setup (alongside the Chief Business Officer), with a focus on digital transformation and product development of digital and learning products.

As the Director, Product Management you will provide recommendation into the Product Development Organization setup including digital transformation within PCMA, talent and structure, cross-functional teams, creating a lean-agile culture, and Product Development, Omni-Channel Learning, and Research strategies.

You are highly curious and have a hungry mind for identifying emerging audiences and actionable insights, needs, and opportunities through market research.

You have the vision to lead Product Development teams, developers, and extended business teams to develop and manage new digital products and services for target audiences and communities within target markets.

You have the creativity to lead critical and design thinking strategies to develop products for audience segments within specific product lines including Learning products, digital products and platforms, Services, and Research products.

Product Management Accountabilities:

·       Develop the vision and roadmap, and create/maintain a detailed prioritized product backlog.

·       Establish close relationships with business stakeholders to translate requirements into the best possible digital and/or product experience.

·       Be the voice of our customers and drive continuous improvements to the digital customer experience.

·       Work with (internal/external) engineering and design teams to determine feasible technical solutions and reasonable implementation solutions and timelines.

·       Facilitate problem solving as required by working closely with design, development and delivery teams.

·       Manage engagement with PCMA stakeholders and effectively communicate product release contents and expected product capabilities/customer journeys.

·       Engage day-to-day with the scrum teams writing and clarifying user stories, participating in sprint planning and reviews, backlog grooming and prioritization.

·       Engage with analytics teams to measure and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) for new features.

·       Maintain an understanding of the business meeting events industry and trends in digital transformation.

·       Direct day-to-day activities in a manner consistent with our risk culture and the relevant risk appetite statement and limits, and communicate it throughout the team.

·       Create an environment in which your team pursues effective and efficient operations of their respective areas while ensuring the adequacy, adherence to and effectiveness of day-to-day business controls to meet obligations with respect to risk and compliance.

·       Coordinate with IT team around capabilities needed from underlying platform infrastructure.

·       Socialize project timelines and roadmaps with stakeholders and maintain accountability on deliverables.

·       Coordinate test materials and content from appropriate stakeholder teams to enable testing of developed capabilities (asset management core-perspective vs. UI UAT).

The Must Haves:

·       At least 5-7 years’ experience working in digital product management, business analysis or in a related field.

·       Excellent product management skills, with proven accomplishments leading cross-functional projects.

·       Solid business acumen, comfort with business strategy, portfolio prioritization, go-to-market and pricing strategies, and KPI and financial measurements.

·       Strong market orientation, deep understanding of market trends, partner and industry ecosystems, and competitive strategies.

·       Customer-experience grounding and ability to design audience-centric experiences throughout customer decision journey.

·       Excellent organizational and analytical skills with strong attention to detail. Experience in business event services is an asset.

·       Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to lead cross-functional teams, engage diverse stakeholders and groups at different levels, and influence change throughout through organization.

·       Experience leading agile methodologies and teams, preferably Scrum.

·       Technical skills with ability to go deep on technology trends, architectural questions, stack control points, data-science, road maps and development life cycles.

·       Keen understanding of media technologies, asset encoding, inspection and production/post-production workflows/tools used in the domain.

·       Business, Engineering, Computer Science degree or related experience in Product Management preferred.

·       Led and conducted a Start-up and/or digital transformation in your experience portfolio.

About You

·       Strong ability to dive into the unknown and create clarity amid chaos.

·       Sharp assessment skills with an ability to vet wants vs. needs.

·       Comfortable and thrive with running lean.

·       Flexible amid an ever-changing and growing environment.

·       Strong problem solver with ability to lead the team to push the best possible solution.

·       Curious and experimental mindset to drive innovation amidst uncertainty.

·       High learnability and hungry for knowledge.

·       Creative, with the ingenuity to identify new angles and methodologies to realize an outcome.

·       Acts with reason and logic to commit to action and reach timely closure on decisions.

About PCMA (additional information):

Our Strategic Plan – Member Centric, Innovation, Solutions.

Our five-year strategic plan guides all of our activities. It helps us focus on our priorities and provides measurable standards of our performance. The plan leverages the best of our past experiences and the knowledge about where the industry needs to go in the future. We have 3 critical organizational goals that will help us achieve our vision and mission.

·       Goal #1 Audience-Centric Organization. Expand PCMA audience and deepen PCMA’s impact to its audience by a relentless focus on audience needs both current and emerging and identifying multi-channel education and services to evolve the industry and market.

·       Goal #2 Innovative Education, Events and Engagement Program & Service Offerings. Develop a series of progressive programs, driven by audience need, designed to advance the vocation and value of the business events strategist across the business community around the world.

·       Goal #3 Financial and Operational Success. Build culture and structure to grow membership, audience and revenue and seek and evaluate opportunities to support growth objectives. Invest in research and innovation to advance business events.

Our People and Culture

“PCMA is celebrated for programs that are cutting-edge and provocative, delivering what business events strategists need to be successful”, said Tonya Almond, PCMA Vice President of Knowledge and Experience Design.

·       Our people have a Passion for Progress.

·       Our people contribute to a variety of projects that positively impact our members and social issues at large.

·       Our people are fearless, innovators and collaborators who know how to leverage the collective genius of the whole to execute on large scale events and who take smart risks – testing, measuring, and creating again.

·       Our people work with leading brands and influential business leaders across the country and around the world.

·       Our people enjoy the autonomy and flexibility to manage their work; while our expectations are high, we expect our people to bring their best ideas and their best self to work each and every day.

Above all, our People are valued. They play a meaningful role in building solutions and shaping the future of PCMA. We believe that having a diverse workforce is not enough, we also need to build a culture of inclusion that leverages the strengths of all of our employees.

Tagged as: Flexible hours, Remote