technical product manager, principal, Customer Experience Engineering

About the role

At Starbucks, our mission is to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time. Starbucks Technologists work to achieve this mission through the use of cutting-edge technology delivered to our partners, customers, stores, roasters, and global communities. This role will recognize and articulate business problems or opportunities, define target metrics, and create well-formed epics or user stories for engineering teams, who can then design, build, release, and monitor technical solutions efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Lead TPM practice for the Customer Experience Engineering (CXE) team, which enables Mobile Order & Pay, Loyalty, and Digital Marketing experiences for Starbucks iOS, Android and Web mobile applications.
• Determine business needs, understand market demands and technical trends, problem solving and propose solutions.
• Align with business partners and stakeholders to balance business and technical objectives and manifest these as clear priorities and stories for the CXE team.
• Manage product planning and development through day-to-day collaboration and decision making with a cross-functional team including architects, developers, designers and business or subject matter representatives.
• Translate customer experience into technical requirements and product solutions.
• Define non-functional requirements including performance, scalability, resilience, usability, accessibility, security, and business continuity.
• Identify opportunities to improve feature performance and overall product health using data.
• Stay abreast of new technology capabilities and leverage knowledge in contributing to product solutions.
• Recommend and plan innovative products and features.

Analysis & KPIs

• Define and analyze metrics that measure and benchmark product success.
• Define product health and performance metrics.
• Create dashboard/reporting requirements and KPIs to measure product performance.
• Measure feature success post deployment and feed insights back to the team and business partners.

Communication & Collaboration

• Interact directly with business and technology stakeholders to understand business problems and partner with technology to define solutions that meet the business needs with technology best practices.
• Presents options/recommendations clearly and persuasively to support business stakeholder decisions.
• Work with engineering teams to understand, prioritize and document technical and non-functional features.
• Own effective relationships with engineering teams across Starbucks Technology.

Product Planning & Delivery

• Practice iterative, agile development.
• Identify and document technical tradeoffs as well as dependencies and constraints.
• Perform validation of feature against stated goals.
• Help resolve technical blocking issues and coordinate solutions across multiple technical teams.
• Work with cross-functional teams on feature sizing and delivery planning.
• Effective communication of product delivery milestones and progress.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business, or relevant field.
• Demonstrated ability to use analytics and optimization tools to inform product planning and prioritization (5 years).
• Demonstrated ability to work with design and engineering to deliver customer facing features (5 years).
• Hands on experience in developing roadmaps, priorities, features, story outlines, writing user stories, refining product backlogs, and coordinating/prioritizing conflicting requirements in a fast-paced, changing environment with variety of stakeholders (5 years).
• Solid understanding of API technologies (REST, authentication, JSON/XML, error handling, versioning).
• Industry experience in a technology environment with a record of successfully delivering complex products (5+ years).
• Strong verbal and written communications skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of industry experience in a technology environment with a record of successfully delivering complex products.
• Recent experience in defining and/or building applications for mobile platforms.
• Ability to read and understand programming languages.
• Prior programming experience a plus.