Associate Director, Product Management

Compensation Range:

Annual Salary: $87,923.00 - $118,690.00

Position Summary

The Associate Director of Product Management supports the strategy, development, and execution of digital products that serve National University’s students, faculty, and staff, They provide strategic leadership and act as the primary champion and subject matter expert. Drives product vision, develops roadmaps, and ensures successful execution of product initiatives. Develops and coordinates the product backlog, or the prioritized list of requirements for future product development. The Associate Director, Product Management innovates, launches, and maintains multiple applications and products, ensuring high-level coordination across cross-functional teams. Utilizes big-picture vision and planning, as well as technical and detail-oriented skills at the task level, to provide mentorship and guidance to all organizational teams involved with the product. Additionally, they are the voice of the product, representing the organization with professionalism, problem-solving acumen, and exemplary communication skills.

Essential Functions:

• Provides direction for product portfolios, aligning product strategy with organizational goals and market trends. Owns and manages the end-to-end lifecycle of multiple products or applications, overseeing innovation, development, and maintenance.
• Collaborates with senior leaders to define product strategies, ensuring alignment with needs and objectives. Develops and prioritizes roadmaps and drives products from concept to launch in a fast-paced environment.
• Collaborates with product vendors, matching product capability with business owner needs. 
• Leads discovery, sets scope, estimates, and develops business case(s) for new engagements.
• Reviews business needs, identifies priorities, and works with the Project Management Office (PMO) team to outline deliverables, milestones, and identifies opportunities and risks.
• Assists leadership to define, research, and prioritize improvement initiatives, ensuring alignment with organizational strategies.
• Ensures projects all have clear design, build, run, maintain, support and security considerations met.
• Coordinates projects, while collaboratively working with the PMO.
• Develops, owns, and executes product roadmap.
• Translates product roadmap features into well-defined product requirements including features, user stories, tasks and acceptance criteria. 
• Creates and maintains detailed documentation of products.
• Works with IT Leadership and PMO to manage product budget where appropriate.
• Provides direction and support to product and project team.
• Provides leadership with updates, metrics, and reports.
• Schedules and carries out User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with business owners.
• Works in an Agile or Agile hybrid environment using best practices.
• Leads the product functional design.
• Works collaboratively with development and Quality Assurance (QA) teams.
• Leads the resolution of complex escalations, acting as a decision-maker for critical issues affecting product delivery. Works with the release management team to coordinate releases and tests features post-release.
• Conducts market research and competitive analysis to inform product development and keep up with trends and emerging technologies.
• Reasonable and consistent attendance to fulfill requirements of the position.
• Other duties as assigned.

Supervisory Responsibilities:

Supervisor duties are to include: This position has supervisory responsibility for 1 - 2 direct reports. 

Requirements:

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Network Administration, or a related field required.
• Masters degree preferred.
• Minimum of twelve (12) years of working experience in a combination of product management, business analysis, project management or closely related fields, required.
• Experience with project analysis, business analysis, estimating, business case development and financial analysis required.
• Microsoft SQL Server database and Agile experience required.
• Extensive experience in process improvement and project management preferred.
• Extensive experience with Student Information Systems (SIS) and Financial Aid processes preferred.
• Direct experience with Anthology Student highly preferred.
• Extensive experience with Salesforce chat, Call Center as a Service (CCAS) solutions, Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA), and telephony systems preferred.
• Comprehensive analytical, conceptual, and problem-solving experience preferred.
• Previous exp