Director, Product Development

Job Description

Position Title: Director, Product Development

Reports To: LLS Chief Technology Officer

Department: Technology

Primary Location: US CA Monterey Headquarters

Additional Location: US (Remote)

Classification: Salary

Position Summary

The Director, Product Development is a senior leadership position that defines and delivers the product vision, strategy, and roadmap, leading a team that is responsible for the launch of new, and enhancement of existing products and services. This position leads the Product Development team which is responsible for preparing product strategy recommendations, providing expert consultation, and performing assessments and analyses supporting corporate priorities, market strategies, product strategies and product launches. This is a multi-faceted position that requires strong interpersonal communication skills and the ability to work across teams delivering results in a fast-paced environment. The successful individual will possess the ability to solve business challenges with technology while establishing long-term solutions to improve the quality and delivery of LanguageLine’s products and services.

Essential Functions

The ideal candidate will help define and execute the product vision for LanguageLine Solutions. This is a high visibility role, meaning that the optimal candidate will be comfortable driving critical business decisions in a fast paced, high pressure, and often ambiguous environment. The successful candidate will be customer focused, highly analytical, resourceful, a big thinker, a strong writer, and an effective influencer able to operate at all levels of the organization. The candidate will serve as an evangelist for LanguageLine products and services and represent these products/services internally and with key vendors and clients.

This candidate will also possess both a strong technical background that enables him/her to easily interact with Product Engineering team members as well as a strong business background that enables him/her to collaborate effectively with other teams within the business including Product Management, Sales, Operations, Marketing, Quality Assurance and Finance. 

Key Essential Functions

Vision, Strategy, Prioritization, Product Evangelization, and Product Development. This role requires high drive for customer satisfaction and delivering on results

• Lead and inspire the Product Development team in envisioning and building world-class products that will benefit and delight customers and contribute to LanguageLine’s top and bottom-line growth.

• Be an advocate for customers and drive innovation on their behalf. Understand and translate market requirements with substantiated customer/market feedback to support the product definition.

• Anticipate the impact of the changing language access industry and regulatory environment on existing market segments and products and propose strategies, tactics, and new or modified products accordingly.

• Lead cross functional teams in the research and analysis of new product concepts and product modification requests ultimately building a business case including product specifications.

• Understand the thorough business case for proposed products and initiatives, including cost/benefit estimates, market trends, competitive analysis, risk analysis, industry best practices and product development timelines.

• Collaborate with leadership and cross-functional product teams to form roadmaps in support of the strategic plans and customer needs and identify new opportunities for existing and new products.

• Break down the strategic roadmap into a focused series of activities and deliverables that the team can rally around.

• Plan and prioritize product features and requirements from conceptual stages through product life cycles to optimize revenue and meet operational, financial, and corporate objectives.

• Collaborate on key design considerations and key architectural decisions.

• Remove organizational and operational bottlenecks that impede product innovation, time to market, and execution.

• As a key product stakeholder, be willing to do what is required to help the team, and to deliver to plan.

• Facilitate internal communication and deci