Data Product Manager

About the Role

The Minnesota Department of Information Technology Services (MNIT), partnering with the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF), is seeking a full-time Data Product Manager to support significant system changes that turn organizational data into scalable, high-value products such as curated datasets, analytics platforms, and data infrastructure supporting the Whole Family approach. This role leads efforts across data engineering, data science, and business strategy to mature data practices and drive organizational shifts to new data lakes and data curation platforms from legacy mainframe systems.

Responsibilities

• Define the vision and roadmap for data products including data platforms, analytics tools, and ML infrastructure
• Identify high-value opportunities by investigating the data landscape, pain points, and business needs
• Align data product strategy with organizational priorities and long-term data architecture in partnership with the Enterprise Architecture team
• Connect data capabilities to business outcomes and organize efforts to achieve those outcomes
• Align engineering, analytics, and business teams
• Use metrics to guide prioritization and product evolution
• Lead the end-to-end lifecycle of data products: requirements, design, development, testing, launch, and iteration
• Partner with data engineers and data scientists to build scalable pipelines, models, and data services
• Ensure data quality, governance, lineage, and documentation standards are met
• Translate business logic into data transformations, metadata, and domain-specific rules
• Ensure data products are reliable, governed, and scalable
• Serve as the primary liaison between technical teams at MNIT and business partners across DCYF
• Communicate product value, roadmap, and use cases to leadership and cross-functional teams
• Prioritize incoming requests and balance competing needs across teams
• Define success metrics and measure product performance and adoption
• Ensure data products deliver actionable insights and support decision making
• Partner with analytics teams to design dashboards, KPIs, and reporting frameworks
• Uphold data governance, privacy, and ethical AI standards
• Ensure compliance with regulatory and organizational data policies
• Advocate for responsible data use across the human services space served by DCYF and MNIT DCYF
• Provide knowledge transfer

Qualifications

• 4-7 years of experience in data management, data analytics, data engineering, or related fields
• Demonstrated product leadership skills and ability to work in ambiguity
• Strong understanding of data systems: pipelines, warehousing, modeling, metadata, and governance
• Proficiency collaborating with data architecture, data engineering, and data science teams
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into business-friendly language
• Strong communication, prioritization, and stakeholder management skills
• Experience with analytics tools (dbt, Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Google Analytics)
• Understanding of large organizational data sharing constraints and data sharing agreements
• Experience with SQL, data lakes, and data pipelines/ETL
• Significant experience with Databricks
• Familiarity with Java and Python
• Background in building internal platforms or developer-facing products
• Experience in implementing modern data architectures at an organization
• Experience in a highly regulated industry performing statistical analysis and reporting