Millions of people interact with the City of Boston digitally each year to do everything from finding information on City services to paying a parking ticket. We believe these experiences should be easy to navigate and accessible. DoIT is focused on partnering with City departments to improve service delivery across the City. We’re a cross-functional team with a mission to improve the user experience of existing digital services, better engage and communicate with our residents, and build new systems to improve how the City delivers services online. 

The Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) provides and maintains mission-critical technologies for the City’s more than 18,000 employees and the hundreds of thousands of constituents they serve. 

As a Senior Product Manager, you’ll define the vision and strategy for product platform development, working across functions to achieve buy-in and alignment so that capabilities can be delivered in a sustainable, holistic way. You’ll build partnerships with multiple stakeholders and align on desired business outcomes in order to communicate long-term roadmaps. You will oversee multiple products and platforms with varying degrees of complexity. You will use your business and technology experience to assess risks and opportunities and you’ll evaluate and decide on trade-off choices with your team. You will define the long-term success of your products, manage and coach less experienced product managers and promote a product innovation culture in the City of Boston.

Senior Product Managers on our team are: 

• Strategic thinkers who are comfortable defining a compelling vision and designing a measurable strategy and roadmap to achieve that vision, owning and stewarding the product vision and leading end-to-end product development. 
• Decisive leaders who know how to motivate cross-functional teams to build the right thing. 
• Experienced in the complexity of digital change management in large organizations and know how to secure stakeholder alignment and negotiate the path to a desired outcome.
• Excited to build institutional expertise around product management by enabling repeatable practices among your peers across the organization and contributing to our growing outcome-driven product culture.

Stakeholder Management:

• Create enduring partnerships with department leaders to keep product decisions aligned with operational goals and objectives over the long term.

Strategic Planning:

• Communicate product development intentions to internal and external users through 12-24 month strategic roadmaps that convey how value will be delivered, building internal and external buy-in along the way.
• Collaborate with Department of Innovation and Technology executive leadership to align product strategy priorities and annual budgets for the next 1-2 years.
• Drive procurement initiatives for components of the product(s) they oversee. Work with executive leadership to set and manage the budget for the product(s).
• With an awareness of commercially available solutions, guide the trade-off choices that are associated with build vs. buy decisions as solution options are explored.

Delivery:

• Lead one or more cross-functional teams of researchers, designers, and engineers to deliver value to end users.  
• Structure and define work so that product improvements can be delivered iteratively and are informed by design and engineering expertise.
• Ensure that projects are resourced with the right combination of skills so that we deliver intended outcomes.
• Ensure that approved work is visualized and shared across teams and that it is supported through its life cycle toward documented desired outcomes.
• Identify and proactively monitor and address product and project risks.
• Drive product launches including working with communications, executives, and other product development team members.
• Define and track key product metrics; use metric targets to inform product evolution.

User Experience:

• Ensure that our technology decisions are informed by end users and that user research, data and user feedback are gathered in order to make roadmap and product priority choices.
• Ensure a consistent, dignified, and delightful end-to-end user experience across products and channels. 

Operations:

• Act as a product evangelist to build awareness and understanding.
• Create standards for requirement documentation that follow agile principles and create practices that deliver value iteratively.
• Ensure that epics, user stories and other requirement records fully express user needs and desired outcomes, and that they align with strategic roadmaps.
• Support sustainable practices so that work is continually refined, prioritized, and slated.
• Collaborate with other teams to ensure that solutions are consistent with standards and that those standards evolve with changing business needs, security and performance requirements and other organizational needs.
• Work with the team to set and meet quality standards for any product you build.
• Assist in procuring additional resources (e.g., software, professional services), as needed.

Management:

• May supervise and coach other staff members.
• May oversee contracts and projects with contractors and vendors.

Perform related work as required.

• At least five (5)  years of full-time, or equivalent part-time, professional experience as a Product Manager of a cross-functional team, or related field.
• A bachelor’s degree preferred.
• Strategic thinking: ability to define and articulate a multi-year product vision and strategy.
• Leadership experience among cross-functional teams that work collaboratively to build new capabilities.
• Demonstrated track record of entrepreneurial action to identify and pursue opportunities with a high degree of autonomy.
• Experience being accountable for business decisions where ambiguity exists and trade-off choices must be made.
• Experience delivering enterprise software capabilities within large organizations and ensuring successful adoption of those capabilities into ongoing operations.
• Organizational skills sufficient to manage a dynamic portfolio of work that spans teams, customers, cultures, and technologies.
• Written and verbal communication skills that generate trust and convey complex technical ideas effectively among diverse audiences, particularly at executive levels.
• Understanding of user centered design methods and usability best practices.
• History of successful delivery of projects following an Agile methodology.
• History of successful partnerships that delivered business value across functional boundaries.
• Strong bias towards action; ability to step up into team gaps and ambiguous situations to structure the team’s action plan.
• Deep knowledge of industry and market trends and the landscape of commercially available solutions that will affect product direction.
• A proficiency with standard office productivity applications (e.g., Google Workspace, Microsoft Office), software lifecycle management platforms (e.g., Jira) and visual communication and ideation tools (e.g., Miro, Visio) required.
• Ability to exercise sound judgment and focus on details as required by the job.

Boston Residency Required

Terms:
Union/Salary Plan/Grade:
SENA/ MM1-10
Hours per week: 35