Principal Software Product Manager

$175,900 - $272,600/Yr

Western Governors University - Salt Lake City, UT

Full-time - Senior

Salt Lake City, UT

Educational Services

About the position

The Principal Software Product Manager at WGU is a senior individual contributor role responsible for leading the development of strategic product roadmaps and ensuring a holistic end-to-end user experience. This position involves collaboration with cross-functional teams to solve complex problems, build business cases, and communicate product vision to stakeholders. The role requires a high level of collaboration, decision-making, and the ability to influence others while managing multiple product domains.

Responsibilities

• Owns the most difficult products/strategies that span multiple product domains and requires high levels of coordination and collaboration.
• Works directly with senior and executive leaders to understand their most pressing problems and help them develop the most effective strategy to solve those problems.
• Leads cross-functional Steering Committees to update and track strategy, ensure alignment with business metrics and goals, and communicate the strategic roadmap.
• Works closely with a cross-functional team of stakeholders, end-users, engineers, UX designers, and product leaders to understand the problems to solve, inform the product vision, and define requirements.
• Leads cross-functional collaboration at the senior level to deliver outcomes and is a go-to person for questions and guidance related to product work.
• Designs experiments to test customer tradeoffs - between user experience, technology constraints, and business value.
• Analyzes the impact of their product domain features on key business outcomes.
• Connects domain data to the experience journey and user and business OKRs/KPIs.
• Leads efforts to create shared outcomes across multiple teams to deliver impact for customers.
• Defines product release strategies, ensuring the readiness of the various business partners.
• Becomes the expert for their product, demonstrating mastery of the current platform with an understanding of gaps that inform their near-term product roadmap and contribute to long-term strategy.
• Manages expectations by understanding when initiatives are at risk and proactively communicating with stakeholders.
• Participates in, presents during, and sometimes leads planning activities.
• Ensures product quality by testing software features to ensure they satisfy the acceptance criteria and work with stakeholders and end users to coordinate user acceptance testing activities.
• Actively mentors and initiates guidance of less-experienced Product Managers through formalized mentorship assignments.
• Partners closely with researchers and analysts to understand the holistic user experience and gain a better understanding of user behavior to identify new opportunities, generating insights that are relevant to more teams than just their domain.
• Uses data in storytelling to influence decisions around the right outcomes to be delivered at the right time.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in a related field.
• Minimum 10 years of demonstrated experience working as a Software Product Manager, Product Owner, or Group Product Manager, with at least 3 years of those as a Senior or Group Product Manager.
• Professional Product Certification (e.g. Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Pragmatic Marketing).
• Experience working in Agile environments.
• Experience managing multiple types of problems at the same time.

Nice-to-haves

• Master's degree in a related field.
• Experience in Education Technology.
• Certified in Change Management.

Benefits

• Bonuses
• Medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare
• Health savings account and flexible spending account
• Basic and voluntary life insurance
• Disability coverage
• Accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages
• Legal and identity theft coverage
• Retirement savings plan
• Wellbeing program
• Discounted WGU tuition
• Flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual
• Flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual
• 11 paid holidays
• Other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave