Senior Director of Product

Job Description

The Campaign Finance Board is a nonpartisan, independent city agency that empowers New Yorkers to have a greater impact on their elections. Our mission is to make local democracy more open, transparent, and equitable by removing barriers to participation.

We make it easier for New Yorkers to vote, meaningfully support candidates for city office, and run for office themselves. NYC Votes, our voter engagement initiative, meets people where they are to share trustworthy election information and help New Yorkers make a plan to vote. We publish the citywide Voter Guide, which delivers information about candidates directly to voters’ doors. Our public matching funds program ensures small contributions can make a big difference, allowing regular people to run for office by relying on the support of other regular people, not just wealthy donors and special interests. And we lift the veil on how candidates raise and spend money, increasing transparency and accountability in local government.

We believe that when every New Yorker is empowered to participate meaningfully in elections, candidates will better reflect the communities they serve, elected leaders will be more accountable to the public, and New Yorkers will have a democracy they can truly trust.

The Strategy, Products, and Innovation division is the agency’s newest division and leads the strategic planning and policy work, working across the agency to test out and implement new ideas. This division also creates the agency’s product roadmap to take us into future elections while maintaining and improving existing systems. The new Product Strategy vertical will be responsible for creating the overall roadmap for tech modernization and process improvements; prioritize tech projects to pursue, and liaise between technical engineers and subject matter experts; and align tech projects with the agency’s strategic plan and objectives. Plans for this vertical include building new teams for product management as well as user experience and service design, as well as some reorganization of existing PMO functions.

The Director of Product will lead the NYC Campaign Finance Board’s first Product Management office. This office will be responsible for strategy, planning, and managing delivery of technical products for CFB, including:

- Iterative improvements of current systems (ex: improve the interfaces and portals by which candidates and the public interact with NYCCFB).
- Legacy overhauls and upgrades (ex: move core databases to the cloud).
- New products and features (new payments platform, salesforce public outreach platform).
- Creating and maintaining roadmaps.
- User research and data analysis.
- Feature selection and prioritization.
- Project management of technical efforts.
- Ticket creation, maintenance, and agile ceremonies.

This position will require the selected candidate to obtain NYC residency within 90 days of starting their job, and be in-person in the CFB Manhattan office a minimum of 1 day a week.

The Director role will be a managerial position over the office’s PMs, a key component of the hiring pipeline, a strategic partner for CFB leadership, and be able to chip in and act as a senior-level Product Manager and Product Strategist when needed. The Director will report to the First Deputy Executive Director.

The Director will also be responsible for understanding the needs of CFB and helping to craft the job description and hiring pipeline for future individual contributor PMs to build out their office. This is a dynamic role that will have a large impact on elections in the City of New York and the future of the CFB.

The ideal candidate will be a senior product manager with people management experience, have worked in government, civic, or political tech before, and have a background in engineering, user research, or design. A strong get things done’ attitude, high emotional intelligence, and excellent communication skills are essential. Responsibilities for this role include, but are not limited to:

Product Management & Product Strategy
- Build an overall product roadmap, including prioritization of new features vs. improving old ones, risk analysis of legacy systems, and plans for rollout/change management.
- Work with other leaders to identify and agree on actionable and measurable goals.
- Set a cadence for measuring and re-visiting these goals.
- Report regularly to leadership team on progress and metrics.
- Ensure open and frequent channels for feedback, internal and external, qualitative and quantitative.
- Incorporate human-centered design and data-driven decision making into all areas of work.
- Occasionally act as PM on direct project work including discovery sprints, running development teams, and overseeing launches.

Product Delivery
- Overhaul IT de