Product Manager

This is a contract with a great organization. As a contractor for Smith Johnson, you are eligible for medical, dental, life, disability and a matching retirement plan. Smith Johnson pays for 70% of your medical and dental and 100% of life and disability. Smith Johnson believes in taking care of our contractors.

Job DescriptionOur Client’s culture supports their mission of student success. Student success encompasses both terminal degrees and the holistic education of students, and they believe they can fulfill this mission best in an environment that allows all individuals to thrive personally and professionally. To this end, the client operates in accordance with three core values: exceptional care, exceptional accountability, and exceptional results.

Who you’d be working with:Our client’s OIT’s people are the best of the best, and they really think you’ll like working with them. Here’s why:

• We care: All of us, to the very highest levels of leadership, actually care about doing what is best for our clients and each other.
• We are dedicated: We don’t stop until it’s done and done right. We have an excellent work-life balance, but that moves and flows around, ensuring the client always has what they need from us. It’s a culture of balance between rest and never dropping the ball.
• We are authentic and intelligent and valued for that: No one feels they must put up any kind of veneer to fit in or get by. We speak our minds without fear, we listen to each other without prejudice, and the best ideas are valued and incorporated into how we do business, period.
• We are in this together: It’s 0% “what’s in it for me” and 100% “what’s in it for us”

As a Product Manager, you’ll be working with people in a wide variety of roles such as client stakeholders (both technical and business), Architects, Product Owners, Developers, and Q.A. Engineers, to name a few. You’ll also have a top-notch peer group of Product Managers to rely on for inspiration and support. Here are a couple of examples:We Document Our Processes, Follow Them Rigorously, and Continuously ImproveHow many times in your current or previous jobs have you said, “We should write this down, all promise do it this way every single time until we learn a better way to do it, and then we will update our process and do it that way until we learn more, then we’ll do it again”? A few? Well, we ACTUALLY DO THAT.More about you, the Newest Product Manager: What Success Looks LikeThe client’s ultimate goal is to deliver real business value to each of their clients in a controlled, predictable way. The Product Manager succeeds when the team succeeds in delivering what was promised, sprint after sprint. If you feel a sense of personal responsibility for ensuring that your team always has everything they need to execute and that any obstacles are immediately removed, you are doing it right.Just as important is being part of the internal Operations Team that continuously examines and refines the processes applied to their client projects. They will want you to learn the way they do things and apply the proven process, all the while being vigilant for improvement opportunities and fearlessly bringing those up for discussion and potential implementation.But What Will I Actually Be Doing?You will jump in without fear to guide the team on agile principles while driving stories to done and delivering business value to stakeholders. Knowing what the team needs ahead of time, using your wizarding powers, you will relentlessly remove impediments and document and manage products and work efforts. This involves:

• Organizing and facilitating all product work efforts
• Continuously engaging the team and empowering members to be as effective as possible
• Working with the Product Owner to ensure projects are moving along in alignment with
• the Product Goal
• Building and maintaining strong, positive relationships with the team and stakeholders
• Documenting and tracking product current state and recording future state
• Tactfully influencing and negotiating with other teams to remove impediments
• Capturing and tracking metrics to provide insight into the products roadmap to its future state

Top Skills & Experience Needed:

• 1+ yrs experience in a real-world environment as a Service and Product Manager
• 3+ yrs experience working as a member of a team

Nice to Have Skills:

• Self-disciplined, proactive, punctual, and detail-oriented
• A natural tendency to take extreme ownership of the work you produce and your team's success
• Team player with a love of collaboration - you thrive on working together towards a common goal and consistently achieving it!
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, including in-person and virtual presentation skills
• An innate desire to continuously improve and learn while being an expert in agility