Product Team Lead

Job Responsibilities

• Manage the product lifecycle from planning through development, launch, and ongoing product enhancements.
• Support the definition, development, and delivery of the product(s) following the RouteOne systems development life cycle.
• Regularly communicate with product stakeholders.
• Identify dealership and finance source problems through market research including visits to dealer and finance source customers.
• Communicate dealer and finance source needs clearly defined and detailed problem statements.
• Translate dealer and finance source needs into clearly defined and detailed product requirements.
• Identify and resolve issues with key internal and customer stakeholders.
• Define the solutions for validated and known market problems by writing detailed requirements, user stories, and maintaining a product backlog.
• Work with one or more development team(s) to groom and refine the product backlog to ensure the development team works on priority items from the perspective of the stakeholders.
• Interact with customers to deliver enhancements to their specifications when custom functionality is required.
• Work with user experience designer to define how users will interact with the product(s).
• Understand the competitive landscape and expectations of persons interacting with the product (I.e., users and buyers).
• Ensure acceptance criteria are met.
• Career Development
• Coordinate, facilitate, and conduct regular product updates.
• Develop and maintain detailed release plans to facilitate external stakeholder expectation-setting and coordination.
• Provide input into long-term product roadmap.
• Ensure product objectives are met across organization through management of a team of Product Owners and Associate Product Owners, including monitoring workflow, meeting deadlines, and addressing issues, as well as identifying and mitigating risks.
• Communicate and coordinate appropriately across products and departments within the organization.
• Coordinate, facilitate, and conduct regular project reviews with each stakeholder across the organization.
• Coordinate with Legal and Security team to ensure any legal- or security-specific requirements are contemplated and addressed.
• Support dealer and finance source sales efforts as needed for assigned projects (including creation of sales materials and delivery of presentations).
• Act as subject matter expert for functional product area(s).
• Maintain safety, security, and privacy standards throughout all areas of responsibility.

Skills

• Proficient in Microsoft Office products including but not limited to: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and Visio.
• Experience with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms.
• Familiarity with software mockup and prototyping tools such as Axure or Balsamiq.
• Familiarity with issue tracking tools such as JIRA.

Abilities

• Ability to think critically.
• Ability to work in a team environment.
• Effective time management skills.
• Experience in owning and managing projects as well as displaying strong leadership and facilitation skills.
• Ability to lead, mentor, and develop team members.
• Effective verbal and written communication skills, including presentation skills.
• Effective problem-solving skills, with a strong solution/implementation focus.
• High degree of flexibility, adaptability, and conflict management capability.
• Self-motivated, self-directed, and politically astute; able to communicate effectively with all levels of enterprise and customer organizations.

Other Essential Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in business or technical area or related work experience in a software development environment.
• 7+ years of overall Product Owner experience.
• Experience managing direct reports a plus.
• Sales and marketing experience, specifically focused on new product development.
• Pragmatic Marketing certification a plus.
• Willingness to travel - this position requires occasional travel to customer sites in North America (10%).