Technical Product Manager

Posted Apr 20

Job Overview:

The Technical Product Managers in Lexia's Professional Learning Product Management organization are responsible for guiding the continual improvement and integrity of the professional learning online applications and platform. This requires collaborating with stakeholders across technical and non-technical internal teams, and developing a good understanding of professional learning within the U.S. PreK-12 education market. The Technical Product Managers work closely with each other and the Content, UX Design, Engineering, and QA teams to influence new ideas, drive product improvements, and manage the technical requirements throughout the software development lifecycle.

The Technical Product Managers have a software development, software architecture, or other strong technical background and become subject matter experts on the platform and technology behind the company's software solutions. They possess strong communication skills, including the abilities to understand and explain market challenges, to define and champion solutions for those challenges, to translate business requirements into feature definitions for technical audiences, and to explain technical risks and limitations to non-technical audiences.

The Technical Product Managers influence and help to manage the product roadmaps and backlog, and assist with internal and external communication of product features, plans, and work in progress.

  • Understand the strategic business goals for the product
  • Work with customer-facing internal teams to understand desired product feature additions and updates
  • Demonstrate proactive understanding of business or market challenges and the ability to offer clear solutions
  • Understand and communicate technical constraints and dependencies and how these may affect the roadmap
  • Communicate and champion the value of the roadmap goals internally and externally as needed
  • Communicate to key stakeholders progress toward the roadmap goals, risks as they materialize, and course corrections when they are needed
  • Fulfill the strategic roadmap goals by defining and prioritizing product features and improvements into releases over time
  • Drive each release of features and improvements through user stories in cross-functional collaboration with Content, UX Design, Engineering, and QA team members
  • Create and manage user stories with clear acceptance criteria, epics for managing related user stories, and bug tickets as needed; ensure that all cross-functional teams understand these artifacts
  • Help manage an updated and prioritized backlog that has a clear and understandable set of prioritized user stories and other tickets as needed; help troubleshoot, prioritize, and assign daily any bug tickets created by the Customer Support and QA teams
  • Constantly manage the scope and content of each monthly release in collaboration with, and with respect to the bandwidth of, all required cross-functional teams
  • Be an expert on the expected behavior and user experience of each products' user personas in order to proactively identify and create user stories for improvements and bug tickets for escaped defects
  • Prepare and publish product release notes
  • Demonstrate and explain features and functionality to internal and external stakeholders as needed
  • Facilitate creation and maintenance of product documentation such as Help Center articles, user guides, etc.
  • Create user personas, use cases, feature briefs and other product documentation outside of the backlog as needed to describe and communicate clearly the value of the features under development

Job Requirements:

  • Bachelor’s degree with at least four (4) years of experience in technical product management 
  • Experience working closely throughout the entire software development lifecycle with UX designers, software developers, and QA engineers as a product manager or product owner
  • Experience as a product manager for online SaaS products is preferred 
  • The ability to think critically and creatively when faced with competing priorities, feature development challenges, and release-blocking issues
  • Strong organizational skills and attention to detail with the ability to meet deadlines 
  • Excellent communication skills in writing for, conversing with, and presenting to engineers, non-technical business leaders, and customers (who could be anywhere from very technical to very non-technical)  
  • Expertise working with Atlassian's Jira software is preferred

To learn more about our organization and the exciting work we do, visit https://www.lexialearning.com/

An Equal Opportunity Employer

We are dedicated to fostering a culture that celebrates unique backgrounds, ideas, and experiences. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability.