Program Manager/Product Manager – Platform

Job ID: BE169999

 

Job Title: Program Manager/Product Manager – Platform

Salary: Open

 

Location: Northern California

 

Job Description:

Does building one of the world’s most sophisticated enterprise applications operating platforms sound like an exciting way to spend your time?  Do you enjoy working with customers and translating their needs into concrete technology efforts?  Do you excel at managing large, multifaceted development efforts?  If so, then our client is for you.

 

Our client it the best company to work for that you’ve never heard of.  They are market leaders in insurance software, serving the second-largest financial services industry in the world (after banking).  They build the core applications that insurance companies use to sell policies, settle claims, and bill their customers.  They serve customers all over the world, helping them handle billions of dollars worth of business.  This is a lucrative and underserved market, and our client has grown rapidly through a combination of quality products, excellent service, innovative technology, and word-of-mouth reputation.

The applications they build are large and extraordinarily complex, highly configurable to meet the unique needs of each of their customers, and have to work reliably and provably.  The platform team provides the set of shared tools and technologies that their application teams use to build customer-facing applications that customers use to implement software within their enterprises.  They’re looking for an experienced, thoughtful, creative, hands-on, and highly-skilled Program and Product Manager to work with the platform team to deliver a great enterprise software platform to our internal and external customers.

 

Our client uses cutting edge processes and technologies to deliver products that customers love.  They’re pioneers in Agile development; few companies anywhere, in any industry, have pushed agile techniques as far as they have.  To give you one example, our client maintains a farm of nearly 200 servers just to continuously run their suite of more than 50,000 unit tests.  Their development process is sustainable, family-friendly, and fundamentally humane, and they pride themselves on a calm, systematic, and rational approach to business.

The Platform Program and Product Manager will assume a wide range of responsibilities.  You should have experience managing large development efforts, understand how to gather requirements for enterprise software applications, have a high degree of comfort with technology, and have exceptional analytical and communications skills. You should enjoy working with customers to understand their needs and thinking through deep and difficult technical problems.  You should also be comfortable both engaging in product design discussions with developers and presenting to prospective customers. They value clear, logical thinking, a focus on quality, and the ability to work well in a team.

 

Responsibilities:

·         will plan and coordinate with the application teams, as well as overall responsibility for scope, timing, and quality.  You’ll work with others on the team to ensure that the product development process is agile, open, and transparent.

·         will work with outside constituencies (customers, implementation teams, and the application development teams) to understand their needs and priorities, communicating those priorities back to the platform team, and working with other product managers and engineers to design features.

·         will represent the platform to outside constituencies, including customers, prospects, implementation teams, and application development teams.

·         will act as an evangelist for the platform and provide expertise and selling tools for the Marketing and Sales organizations, including presenting directly to customers (a separate Product Marketing function is directly responsible for messaging and collateral)

·         will have potential for engineering management responsibility

·         will work with key constituents inside and outside the team to help articulate the platform strategy and roadmap

·         will report to the Vice President of Product Development

 

Qualifications:

·         must have a Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science or related engineering degree from a top university

·         must have experience as a software engineer

·         must have enterprise software experience, including exposure to platform and core technology issues

·         must have had exposure to customer implementation and maintenance issues, in a consulting, support, and/or product management role

·         must have project management experience, including projects involving coordination across multiple teams

·         must have experience gathering requirements and knowing how to reflect customer priorities and perspectives to an internal development team

·         must have ability to manage complex initiatives with limited supervision

·         must have exceptional written and oral communication skills.  Effective in customer-facing situations

·         must have good decision-making skills

·         must have ability to excel in a team-oriented environment

·         must have a real passion for detailed feature design and problem solving

·         good to have engineering management experience

·         must have ability to work alongside the rest of their product development team in San Mateo, CA.

 

Company Culture:

• company is in Pre-IPO hi-growth mode
• company develops mission-critical enterprise applications for leading insurance institutions
• company employs 350+ professionals (will be looking to double in size by same time next year)
• company established in 2001 – backed by leading venture capital firms
• company has a well seasoned and highly reputable management team

 

To apply for this position please click here to send your resume