Product Manager, Custom Engineering Applications

About the role

The Product Manager will be responsible for the strategic ownership, evolution, and performance of Black & Veatch’s portfolio of custom-built and hybrid engineering applications used internally by Engineering professionals across Black & Veatch.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the portfolio intake process for custom and hybrid engineering applications, ensuring all requests are framed as customer or user problems, not solution requests.
• Establish clear intake criteria, qualification thresholds, and decision artifacts aligned to DPOM Opportunity Intake & Screening practices.
• Partner with engineering, architecture, cybersecurity, and business leaders to shape demand early, reducing low-value or duplicative requests before they enter delivery.
• Design and operate a quantitative prioritization model for the application portfolio that balances business value and user impact, risk reduction, technical debt, and strategic alignment to enterprise and digital priorities.
• Use objective scoring, trade-off analysis, and capacity-aware planning to support fact-based investment decisions and funding conversations.
• Facilitate portfolio-level reviews and decision forums as part of DPOM governance rituals.
• Support application rationalization efforts to assess the current state across relevance, redundancy, fitness for purpose, and total cost of ownership.
• Define and socialize a target future-state portfolio, including sunset, consolidation, modernization, or investment decisions, migration paths to platforms, shared services, or products where appropriate.
• Ensure rationalization decisions are anchored in measurable outcomes, not anecdotal preferences.
• Establish authoritative visibility and control over the portfolio, owning the ongoing sustainability, operations, and functionality of custom, customized, and COTS-adjacent engineering applications across their full lifecycle.
• Ensure applications remain reliable and performant, accounting for software version changes, data integrity, and updated business needs.
• Make informed decisions related to data structures, data flow, 2D/3D model manipulation and upstream/downstream integrations.
• Proactively manage technical debt, vendor dependencies, and platform constraints.
• Partner closely with architecture, platform engineering, and cybersecurity teams to ensure that product roadmaps explicitly include investments that improve security posture, system reliability, resilience, and scalability.
• Define and own product success metrics aligned to the DPOM Success Metrics & Governance framework.
• Create a culture where progress, performance, and trade-offs are visible, trusted, and continuously refined, reinforcing accountability across teams.
• Act as the single-threaded owner for assigned products and portfolio segments, coordinating across engineering, UX, architecture, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders.
• Coach teams and partners in product mindset vs. project mindset, reinforcing DPOM behaviors and expectations throughout the lifecycle.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in product management, digital platforms, or complex application portfolios, preferably in engineering, infrastructure, or asset-intensive environments.
• Demonstrated experience implementing structured intake, prioritization, and portfolio rationalization approaches.
• Strong analytical capability with experience designing quantitative prioritization and decision frameworks.
• Experience as a product manager for custom applications that support engineering delivery, including plugins, add-ons/bolt-ons, and COTS adjacent applications, such as Autodesk, Bentley/ProjectWise, SmartPlant or similar engineering design systems.
• Proven ability to define, operationalize, and use product performance metrics to drive outcomes.
• Excellence in cross-functional leadership, stakeholder management, and clear communication with technical and business audiences.
• Track record of managing long-living, business-critical applications used daily, globally, by engineers, balancing business needs with stability, security, maintainability and operational risk.
• Proven ability to partner with Engineering, Security, Architecture, and AI leaders.
• Bachelor’s in Computer Science / Engineering or equivalent experience.
• Experience working within or implementing a product operating model (DPOM, SAFe, or equivalent).
• Familiarity with secure and scalable architecture, cloud platforms, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Experience modernizing legacy or bespoke engineering applications into sustainable, platform-oriented solutions.