Technical Product Manager

Cambium Learning Group

8d•Remote

About The Position

The Technical Product Managers in Lexia's Product Management organization are responsible for guiding the continual improvement and integrity of the company's online student and educator applications and platforms. This requires collaborating with stakeholders across technical and non-technical internal teams, and developing a good understanding of the products' fit within the U.S. PreK-12 education market. The Technical Product Managers work closely with each other, as well as with the broader Product Management, Content, Learning Design, UX Design, Engineering, and QA teams to influence new ideas, drive product improvements, and manage the technical requirements throughout the software development lifecycle. The Technical Product Managers have a software development, software architecture, or other strong technical background and become subject matter experts on the platform and technology behind the company's software solutions. They possess strong communication skills, including the abilities to understand and explain market challenges, to define and champion solutions for those challenges, to translate business requirements into feature definitions for technical audiences, and to explain technical risks and limitations to non-technical audiences. The Technical Product Managers influence and help to manage the product roadmaps and backlog, and assist with internal and external communication of product features, plans, and work in progress.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree with at least four (4) years of experience in technical product management
Experience working closely throughout the entire software development lifecycle with UX designers, software developers, and QA engineers as a product manager or product owner
The ability to think critically and creatively when faced with competing priorities, feature development challenges, and release-blocking issues
Strong organizational skills and attention to detail with the ability to meet deadlines
Excellent communication skills in writing for, conversing with, and presenting to engineers, non-technical business leaders, and customers (who could be anywhere from very technical to very non-technical)

Nice To Haves

Experience as a product manager for online SaaS products is preferred
Expertise working with Atlassian's Jira software is preferred

Responsibilities

Understand the strategic business goals for the product as owned and articulated by the business Product Managers
Work with customer-facing internal teams to understand desired product feature additions and updates
Demonstrate proactive understanding of business or market challenges and the ability to offer clear solutions
Understand and communicate technical constraints and dependencies and how these may affect the roadmap
Communicate and champion the value of the roadmap goals internally and externally as needed
Communicate to key stakeholders progress toward the roadmap goals, risks as they materialize, and course corrections when they are needed
Fulfill the strategic roadmap goals by defining and prioritizing product features and improvements into releases over time
Drive each release of features and improvements through user stories in cross-functional collaboration with Content, Learning Design, UX Design, Engineering, and QA team members
Create and manage user stories with clear acceptance criteria, epics for managing related user stories, and bug tickets as they occur; ensure that all cross-functional teams understand these artifacts
Help manage an up-to-date and prioritized backlog that has a clear and understandable set of prioritized user stories and other tickets as needed; help troubleshoot, prioritize, and assign daily any bug tickets created by the Customer Support and QA teams
Constantly manage the scope and contents of each monthly release in collaboration with, and with respect to the bandwidth of, all required cross-functional teams
Become an expert on the expected behavior and user experience of each products' user personas in order to proactively identify and create user stories for improvements and bug tickets for escaped defects
Experiment with the latest tools to improve the requirements definition process; share findings with the rest of Product Management and cross-functional teams
Prepare and publish product release notes
Demonstrate and explain features and functionality to internal and external stakeholders as needed
Help to create and maintain product documentation such as Help Center articles, user guides, etc.
Create user personas, use cases, feature briefs, and other product documentation as needed to describe and communicate clearly the value of the features under development