Director of Product

Requisition 37569: B6 Director of Product 

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Norfolk Southern offers a unique opportunity to be part of our proud legacy that spans nearly 200 years. We are a customer-centric, operations-driven team dedicated to advancing safety, serving communities, and driving innovation for tomorrow's rail.  As part of Norfolk Southern, you’ll join a collaborative team where there are opportunities for growth across the organization. We are building a culture where everyone can thrive by owning and driving exceptional results, being humble and leading with trust, serving our customers with excellence, and collaborating and coaching to win.

Job Description: 

Norfolk Southern’s Product Owners are responsible for guiding the development and management of technology products throughout their lifecycles. The Director of Product is a senior position responsible for owning the vision and delivery of all technology products that support Intermodal and Automotive Operations, a business group that manages a budget of over $500M and helps generate over $5 BN in revenue.

Product owners lead cross-functional teams, including software engineers, designers, business stakeholders and external contributors, to ensure the successful delivery of systems from conception to value realization. Their scope is broad, including researching business/market needs, developing product strategy, guiding user experience, specifying requirements, prioritizing features, guiding development effort and managing a broad range of users and stakeholders. Once a product is launched, they will monitor performance, gather feedback, and make data-driven decisions to improve its functionality and user experience. Ultimately, Product Owners ensure that what is being created is worthwhile in terms of the time, money, and energy expended, ensuring that the product meets both user needs and business goals.

The Director of Product will be responsible for several teams of product owners, ensuring that they are working to deliver the company’s strategy The ideal candidate will have direct experience as a product manager in a technology environment, as well as experience managing and developing teams of product managers. A deep understanding of modern software development is a key pre-requisite.

The role requires juggling numerous and often conflicting priorities. It demands careful navigation of complex decisions to ensure outcomes that are aligned with the company’s strategy, while keeping stakeholders engaged and bought in. Consequently, exceptional communication and organizational skills are critical. Coaching and shaping the team to become world-class product managers is a key part of the role. An understanding of financial analysis will be an asset, to ensure decisions are based on sound economics.

The ideal candidate will have deep concern with the quality of products developed by the team, never settling for “it’s good enough” or “it gets the job done” or “it’s just how it’s always worked”. They ideal candidate will be an experienced manager of product managers who has worked with high performing technology teams. Breadth of experience across technology domains will be an asset - UI/UX, software engineering, data analysis, security, IT operations and support. Experience building products in an operations environment (Transportation, Manufacturing, etc.) will be an asset.

 

What we are looking for:

· 5+ years’ experience in a product manager role, working with a high performing technology team.

· 2+ years’ experience managing and coaching teams in complex environments

· Experience building and adapting product strategy

· Familiarity with UI/UX principles, modern software development

· Experience defining, building and shipping complex technology products

· Experience collaborating with and inspiring designers, developers and business stakeholders in an agile environment

· Experience creating and iterating product roadmaps

· Ability to define and prioritize multiple initiatives while working cross-functionally and managing complex, technical and non-technical stakeholder relationships

· Excellent communication skills, and the ability to work across multiple products aligning on goals and deliverables

· Genuine user empathy and passion for solving their most complex problems with the products you ship

· An entrepreneurial mindset - you must be comfortable rolling up your slee