Product Manager (New Product Development)

Accountabilities

You will own the day-to-day product direction and delivery, ensuring that the team consistently builds the right solutions and achieves agreed user and business outcomes. Your responsibilities will include:

• Backlog ownership: Manage the product backlog end to end, personally writing user stories and acceptance criteria, breaking work into manageable increments, and maintaining at least two sprints of refined, ready-to-build work.

• Product discovery: Partner with UX and engineering teams to conduct user interviews, usability tests, prototyping, and lightweight experiments, ensuring product decisions are grounded in user research and evidence.

• Daily team collaboration: Work closely with engineers and designers, participate in daily stand-ups, resolve questions promptly, review work in progress, and accept or reject completed stories against defined acceptance criteria.

• Prioritization and decision-making: Rank initiatives according to user value and business impact, make timely scope and sequencing decisions, explain trade-offs, and adapt priorities as new evidence emerges.

• Outcome measurement: Establish success metrics with client sponsors, track indicators such as adoption, task completion, conversion, and user satisfaction, and use release performance to inform future backlog decisions.

• Technical collaboration: Develop a strong understanding of product architecture and engage in discussions about APIs, data models, and integrations. Independently retrieve and analyze product data to support decisions.

• Release management: Coordinate frequent releases with engineering teams through CI/CD processes, prepare release notes, and manage rollout communications with client stakeholders.

• Product vision and roadmap: Translate client objectives into a clear product vision and actionable near-term roadmap that guides team execution.

• Agile delivery: Participate actively in Sprint Planning, Reviews, Retrospectives, and scaled Agile activities such as PI Planning. Maintain a refined, sized, and dependency-mapped backlog while collaborating with the Scrum Master to improve delivery flow and predictability.

• Client engagement: Act as the primary product representative to client sponsors, leading demonstrations, regular check-ins, discovery workshops, and stakeholder discussions with clear, evidence-based recommendations.

• Delivery performance: Track engagement-specific success measures, including outcomes delivered, backlog quality, release frequency, and client satisfaction.

• Initial delivery milestones: Establish a product baseline within the first 30 days, covering users, objectives, current metrics, and backlog health, and deliver an agreed roadmap with measurable outcome targets within 90 days.

• Risk and stakeholder management: Anticipate upcoming decisions and delivery risks, escalate issues early with recommended solutions, and keep clients and teammates informed.

• Consulting delivery: Balance client outcomes with project schedules, utilization targets, and the expectations of a billable, project-based environment.

Requirements

The ideal candidate is a decisive, technically fluent product professional who combines strong discovery and delivery skills with client-facing experience. The required qualifications include:

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field; an advanced degree is considered an advantage.

• At least five years of hands-on Product Manager or Product Owner experience within software or application development teams.

• Demonstrated ownership of product backlogs, including personally writing user stories and acceptance criteria.

• Current or recent experience, ideally within the past five years, at a product-led technology company or in the digital or product practice of a leading consulting firm.

• Proven experience conducting product discovery with UX and design teams, including user interviews, usability testing, and prototyping.

• Experience working with teams that release frequently through CI/CD and measure product outcomes and delivery flow rather than relying solely on velocity.

• Strong technical understanding, including the ability to discuss APIs, data models, and software architecture with engineers.

• Ability to independently analyze product data using SQL, analytics platforms, or comparable tools.

• Strong working knowledge of Jira and Confluence, along with experience using Figma or similar design tools.

• Experience working within Scrum and SAFe or another scaled Agile framework, including participation in PI Planning.

• At least three years of client-facing experience in consulting, professional services, or direct collaboration with business stakeholders.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present concise, polished, executive-ready recommendations and lead with the key message.

• A proactive ownership mindset, strong judgment, curiosity, and the ability to structure ambiguous problems and make decisions independently.

• Must be located in and legally authorized to work in the United States for the entire duration of the engagement.

Additional qualifications considered an advantage:

• CSPO, SAFe POPM, or another relevant product management certification.

• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or other public cloud application development environments.

• Hands-on experience with prototyping, product analytics, or experimentation tools, including A/B testing.

• Previous professional experience in engineering, design, or data before transitioning into product management.

• Experience working with government or public sector clients.

• Experience collaborating with geographically distributed teams.

Benefits

• Full-time engagement with remote work options across the United States, including Chicago, Illinois.

• Opportunity to work on modern, cloud-native applications built on Google Cloud Platform.

• Hands-on ownership of product direction, backlog management, discovery, and delivery.

• Close collaboration with dedicated engineering and design teams.

• Direct engagement with client sponsors and business stakeholders.

• Opportunity to influence measurable product and business outcomes.

• Exposure to agile delivery practices, frequent releases, and modern product development tools.

• Structured onboarding during the first several weeks, including training materials, compliance requirements, and introductions to key collaborators.

• Expected start date: As soon as possible.