Staff/Principal Technical Product Manager (Fed Health & Civilian)

 

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today’s digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, product managers are responsible for strategy, planning, execution, stakeholder management, and team health. Product managers partner with researchers, designers, engineers, client stakeholders, and others to inform their product decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to figure out what to build next and why.

A technical product manager specializes in products with significant technical depth — platforms, APIs, data systems, or modernization efforts — where product decisions depend on fluency with the underlying architecture and engineering tradeoffs.

In this role, you’ll lead technically complex products across our federal health and civilian portfolio — the platforms, data systems, and modernization efforts behind services that millions of people rely on to access care, benefits, and other essential programs. You’ll work at the point where product strategy meets real engineering tradeoffs, helping cross-functional teams turn complex, often legacy-bound systems into services that work for the people who depend on them.

What you’ll do

• Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, and engineers to build and ship technically complex, high-impact products and services

• Translate user needs, policy requirements, and engineering realities into a product strategy — vision, measures of success, roadmap, and a prioritized backlog

• Make product decisions that hinge on fluency with the underlying architecture, APIs, and data systems, weighing engineering tradeoffs alongside user and business value

• Manage direction, scope, and priorities from user research through minimum viable product to scalable, sustainable solutions

• Draw on data and feedback to continually sharpen the product strategy and roadmap

• Partner closely with government teams to transfer product and technical knowledge, and creatively navigate bureaucratic constraints to clear the path for delivery

What we’re looking for

Basic qualifications

• Understand lean product principles and how to apply them (e.g., minimum viable product) at various stages of the product life cycle in order to mitigate risk, validate assumptions, and amplify learning

• Can develop a product strategy that is informed by an understanding of the problem to be solved, prioritizes outcomes over feature sets, and establishes the direction of the product over time (e.g., product roadmap), including success criteria

• Ability to execute the product strategy by breaking down the product’s scope into usable chunks of value that can be realized sooner rather than later, creating and maintaining a prioritized backlog with validated user stories, and facilitating team ceremonies over the course of the product’s iterations

• Hands-on technical background, such as prior experience as a software engineer, engineering manager, data engineer, or architect, with the ability to evaluate technical trade-offs and engage in architecture and API discussions

• Understand how to engage in the process of human-centered design in order to better inform product direction

• Ability to collaborate with folks outside of your discipline, such as researchers, designers, engineers, and others, in order to get things done

• Ability to manage clients and stakeholders in a way that builds trust, alignment, and healthy environments for individuals and teams

• Understand the merits of different software development methodologies (e.g., agile, lean) and how to put them into practice

• Translating fluently between technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Experience working on cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering, ops) in iterative delivery

• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values

Nice-to-haves

• Familiarity with the technical side of modernization work — APIs, cloud platforms, data systems, or migrating off aging legacy systems

• Experience with health, ben