Senior Technical Software Product Manager

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
 

Pay Range: $127,700.00 - $191,500.00

Job Description

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Works closely with cross functional team of stakeholders, end-users, engineers, enterprise architects, and product leaders to understand the problems to solve, help drive the product vision and define requirements. Plays a key role in the software development process, bridging the gap between technical expertise and product strategy.
• Creates shared outcomes with multiple teams to deliver impact for customers.
• Defines product release strategies, ensuring the readiness of the various business partners.
• Recognized expert for their product, demonstrating mastery of the current platform with an deep understanding of gaps that inform their near-term product roadmap and helps to establish long-term strategy.
• Manages expectations by understanding when initiatives are at risk and proactively communicating with stakeholders.
• Leads and presents in quarterly 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.
• Mentors and guides newer Product Managers.
• Leads research efforts to distill clarity from ambiguity and develops data collection strategies that identify the right outcomes for measuring success.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Knowledge, Skill and Abilities:

• Possess a deep understanding and technical background in Service Oriented Architecture.
• Understands the scope of cloud computing and how to work with software architecture to identify the best practices to deliver high-scale platforms, built for reliability, sustainability, and addressing security vulnerabilities.
• An ability to create design artifacts that provide visual and narrative detail of architectural requirements, decisions, and designs to provide linkage between architecture, engineering, infrastructure, enterprise security, and feature-driven product teams.
• Able to easily communicate technical issues and business requirements and value-based outcomes that are required to address platform scale specifications.
• Develop technology modernization roadmaps that enable constant iterative improvements that correspond with operational and business requirements of the university.
• Understand and learn the nature of a legacy enterprise platform architecture with all of the nuances required to build bridges for future capabilities while maintaining current operational excellence.

Competencies: 

Organizational, Operational, and/or Student Impact:

• Follows technical/ business processes; helps support change when necessary.
• Executes complex, specialized technical projects/assignments.
• Responsible for major or many components in the area of expertise.
• Limit errors to prevent impact to client operations, costs, or schedules.

Job Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field or equivalent.
• 7 years of deep technical software experience in engineering, design, architecture, and enterprise integration.
• Experience working in Agile environments.  
• Excellent