Product Delivery Manager, Ship/Receive/Blend

CHS Inc. is a leading global agribusiness owned by farmers, ranchers and cooperatives across the United States that provides grain, food and energy resources to businesses and consumers around the world.  We serve agriculture customers and consumers across the United States and around the world.  Most of our 10,000 employees are in the United States, but today we have employees in 19 countries. At CHS, we are creating connections to empower agriculture.

Summary

CHS IT is shifting to a customer-focused product model to enable digital growth across the enterprise. In this new model, there will be dedicated product teams focused on improving customer satisfaction and driving continuous delivery of value to product stakeholders. IT has created a new Product Delivery Manager role to lead the Ship/Receive/Blend product delivery team. The Product Delivery Manager is a servant leader focused on executing the product vision by staying abreast of latest agile tools and techniques and by removing obstacles that impede team health and product delivery. The focus of the Product Delivery Manager is to drive execution of the product roadmap using agile and lean practices while actively managing the overall team health of the product delivery team.

 

This position is a remote opportunity with occasional travel and can be located anywhere within the US.

Responsibilities

Lead Product Execution and Delivery

• Ensure delivery milestones are established and tracked, and delivery progress is forecasted and communicated to the product manager and product team.
• Escalate and communicate deviations in scope, resource budget, and timelines as appropriate.
• Collaborate with the product owner to define product success criteria and ensure team clearly understands the vision and objectives of the product.
• Review progress toward goals on a regular basis by determining specific metrics that the team should gather and report.
• Build trust with stakeholders by delivering incremental value critical to achieving goals.

 

Manage Team Health and Cultivate Agile Mindset

• Ensure team health through consistent team engagement activities and sustainable workload management.
• Assess team composition and recommend staffing changes.
• Work with team members and their resource managers as appropriate to identify professional development opportunities to enable individual professional success.
• Help teams organize themselves for optimal delivery outcomes by ensuring the roles and responsibilities required for success are defined and distributed throughout the team.
• Create an Agile Mindset and a culture of Continuous Team Improvement by creating an environment that promotes high performance teamwork by establishing the following priorities: team health and safety, continuous learning, creative experimentation, goal achievement, and value delivery. Ensure scrum ceremonies are effectively run.

 

Manage Team Performance (Velocity and Capacity)

• Identify, remove and/or escalate risks, roadblocks, and dependencies that are unresolvable by the product team and interfere with the team’s ability to deliver.
• Directly manage the Business Analysts on the product delivery team as well as indirectly manage a cross functional team focused on product delivery.
• Manage to the overall team budget.
• Ensure that product risks are identified, tracked, and communicate with stakeholders on a regular basis.
• Where possible, implement mitigation strategies.

Minimum Qualifications (required)

• Bachelor's degree in Information technology, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology Management, or related field (or equivalent years of work experience, education and/or training)
• 4+ years of experience in Information Technology and/or IT Technology Consulting and Support to include:
  • Leadership experience leading technical and/or functional team members
  • Proven ability to create an atmosphere of mentoring, quality, diversity, collaboration and continuous improvement by actively coaching product team members
  • Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to identify and drive resolution to issues impacting the product team
  • Demonstrated ability to help Agile teams achieve delivery outcomes and quantifiably improve delivery metrics
  • Understanding of and commitment to the Agile mindset, principles, and practices

Additional Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience working in a production agriculture setting (agronomy or grain)
• 2+ years of experience working with commercial off the shelf (COTS) vendor(s) with a focus on scaling and blending systems (Agris Onweigh, Kahler, Compuweigh)