Senior Manager - Digital Products

Location: Hybrid Work Model – Van Wert, Ohio or Dublin, Ohio
 

At Central, we believe technology enables great experiences for our customers, agents, and employees.  We also believe great experiences are key to our success and that's why we're building a world class digital product team to help us leverage technology to drive continued growth.

As a Senior Manager- Digital Products, you'll lead a team of Product Owners that create and deliver solutions with outcomes that improve our Core Policy Personal Lines, Core Policy Commercial Lines, Billing & Finance, and Claims Products. Your team will bridge Product Management and Engineering by breaking long-term strategy down into an executable roadmap. 

Working with your Engineering and Design counterparts, you’ll ensure we maximize our investment in product development by ensuring your team clearly articulates requirements, breaks down work, and orchestrates the product team's activities.   

How You Will Make an Impact

Market Discovery

• Research
  • User focused market research: Ensure team fully understands the value of discovery work. Ensure team is conducting continuous discovery and sharing actionable findings.  Assess team gaps in discovery and create training plans.  Coach team on how to incorporate user research into roadmap planning. 
  • Internal opportunities: Ensure team knows how to articulate prioritization process to stakeholders.  Coach team on how to get to the root problem an enhancement in meant to address rather than simply slotting a proposed solution. 
  • Market research: Help team assimilate market research finding and distill the information down to the most salient points. 
  • Legal and regulatory: Facilitate relationship with legal and security and compliance teams.  Recognize patent potential and surface to legal for consideration.

Strategic Planning

• Strategy
  • Market selection: Help team develop and communicate market selection point of view. 
  • Routes to market: Help team understand the chosen routes to market.  Help team communicate any issues related to routes to market choices.
  • Build, buy, partner:  Help team understand how to identify options, gather information, and prepare a business case.
  • Value analysis: Help team identify data sources for business cases.  Review business cases and coach team on missed inputs and point out overly optimistic or conservative inputs.
  • Viability analysis: Coach teams as they gather information and create a point of view on viability.  Ensure team considers all data inputs.
  • Product strategy and prioritization: Walk the team through the prioritization process helping them think critically about their decisions.  Help the team understand the implications of their trade-offs. 

Definition and Viability

• Planning
  • Roadmap and work breakdown: Review all initiatives and suggest improvements. Spot review epics and recommend improvements. Recommend ways to improve the handoff between Discovery and Delivery.  Ensure Engineering and Design are engaged. Identify missed dependencies between product teams and help align roadmaps accordingly. 
  • Effort sizing: Broker sizing conversations with Product Development, PM, and Design.  Ensure all perspectives are considered.  Encourage team to find scope reductions were appropriate while being mindful of trading off too many differentiators found in user discovery. 
  • Sprint planning: Identify repeat planning challenges and work with teams to build a plan to address.  Help team set realistic expectations so they can deliver at least 90% of the planned work in each sprint.     

• Validation
  • Opportunity testing: Ensure team is constantly looking for assumptions to test and finding new ways to fail fast by testing assumptions early and often.  Ensure the process is in place to report on both failed and successful assumption tests (failed tests equate to time and money saved).
  • Product Management walk throughs: Coach team on walk throughs to ensure they cover the correct level of detail and present in an engaging manner.
  • Design walk throughs: Ensure team members attend Design walk throughs and provide meaningful feedback. Ensure we are balancing engineering effort with UX needs.

Build and Deliver

• Handoff
  • Development commit: Develop a collaborative relationship with engineering and ensure they have a mechanism to escalate concerns.  Coach teams to ensure they are providing adequate detail to engineers and considering their concerns. Advise team on when to push and when to change dates or scope. 
• Tracking
  • Progress tracking: Track outcomes and release progress and work with teams to adjust when needed.  Know when to push team to challenge themselves.
  • Enhancements and defects: Ensure team is responding to enhancement requests in a timely manner.  Ensure enhancement requests are being properly prioritized.  Ensure team and requestors understand request process.
  • Stakeholder management: Coach team on how to handle challenging stakeholder relationships.  Serve as an escalation point for your team.
  • Vendor relationships: Ensure team is tracking vendor costs and relationships and that the vendor is delivering the anticipated value. 
• Release
  • Release rollout and enablement: Develop rollout plans for internal and external features, including train the trainer, dark releases, and canary releases.  Identify and suggest changes when release issues occur. Work with Product Development and Design to conduct training sessions for department and agent trainers as needed.
  • Quality testing: Draft acceptance criteria and assist in running high-level functional end-to-end testing when other resources are unavailable.
  • User acceptance testing: Attend UAT sessions as needed. Audit UAT process and track number of additional enhancement requests generated.  Suggest assumption testing and requirements writing process improvement steps when unacceptable number of changes are discovered during UAT.
  • Compliance: Co-ordinate project releases with relevant internal audit, and security teams to ensure all compliance requirements are met.
• Go-to-market
  • Go-to-market targets: Ensure team understands and tracks GTM.  Ensure team understands how they contribute to GTM targets.
  • Value prop messaging: Provide critical and constructive feedback to team on value proposition to ensure it is clear and relevant.
  • Communications: Coach team on communication skills, messaging, and how to find speaking opportunities. 
  • Packaging: Help team understand how packaging decisions effect digital products.  Challenge the team to think about ways to promote cross-sell and up-sell.

Sense and Respond

• Coordination
  • X-functional coordination: Ensure team maintains collaborative mindset with their Design and Development counterparts as well as the broader x-functional team.
• Performance
  • Product outcomes: Ensure team is continuously tracking product outcomes.  Regularly discuss outcomes and action plans for missed outcomes.
  • Financial performance: Understand financial performance and product contribution.
  • Product cost tracking: Understand costs and prepare summarized reports. Surface and resolve cost overruns.
  • Partner and vendor performance: Track various metrics about our vendor relationships to ensure we are seeing the expected value.  Make recommendations on how to improve the relationships and/or suggest alternative partners.
  • Service and experience performance: Set and track service and experience targets.  Create reports to be shared with larger teams.
  • Quality performance: Understand product quality and create epics and initiatives to address if needed.

What You Will Bring

• Master’s degree in business management or related field and 4 years of direct Product Management experience including 1 year management experience
  • Or Bachelor’s degree in business management or related field and 4 years of direct Product Management experience including 1 year management experience
  • Or 8 years of direct Product Management experience including 1 year management experience
• Ability to lead, mentor, and develop a team of product owners
• Expert research skills to conduct primary and secondary market research
• Expert ability to gather and synthesize large quantities of information to find unmet needs and opportunities
• Expert strategic thinking skills to development roadmaps
• Basic financial accounting skills to populate predefined business case templates and understand and make recommendations based on the results
• Comfort leading groups of people in innovation workshops
• Clear written communications skills to convert research to requirements and to evangelize products
• Inquisitive style with the motivation to ask “why”
• Clear communication style to explain prioritization decisions and articulate product strategy and roadmaps
• Excellent public speaking skills
• Strong ability to lead through referent and expert power rather than direct reporting relationships
• Strong knowledge and experience with the software development lifecycle
• Strong experience working in an agile environment
• Ability to not only communicate in software engineering specific jargon and non-technical language but also translate between the two