Product Manager

Location: Hybrid in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. Ability to work in-person part of each work week in Crema's Kansas City office.

We're looking for a detail-oriented person with senior-level experience working with digital products to join our Product Management team. Crema Product Managers are servant leaders responsible for guiding effective collaboration with our clients and product teams. They ensure that all client engagements and products are thoughtfully planned, that goals are effectively created and communicated between the client and production team, and that the collaborative experience is professionally executed.

At Crema, we craft our product teams to solve hard problems – client problems and business problems – in ways that our clients and their customers love, yet work for their business. Our product teams are cross-functional and resilient, generally comprised of a product manager, a product designer, a test engineer, and several developers.

We staff our product teams with the skills necessary to help our clients come up with effective solutions that are valuable (our clients' customers choose to buy or use), viable (the solution works within the many constraints of the client business), usable (the user can figure out how to use) and feasible (our developers have the skills and technology to implement).

While the product designer is accountable for ensuring the solution is usable, and the developers are accountable for ensuring the solution is feasible, the product manager is accountable for ensuring the solution is both valuable and viable.

This means that the product manager must contribute to their product team a solid knowledge of the various constraints of the client business – constraints from marketing, sales, service, finance, legal, and privacy are typical examples. The product manager must also contribute to the product team a deep knowledge of the client's users and customers, and the data about how their customers engage with our products. Finally, the product manager is expected to track industry trends and the competitive landscape as they pertain to their products.

While each member of the product team may be accountable for a specific risk, we look for product managers that understand that consistent innovation is the result of each member of the product team contributing their passion and their ideas. The product manager must collaborate closely with their product designer and developers to discover effective solutions, and then collaborate together to deliver those solutions to market.

This job, as with the other roles on the product team, is an individual contributor role. You will need to be able to influence your teammates, as well as clients, their stakeholders, and key executives, through your use of data and logic.

For the Product Manager role, we are seeking an individual able to work in a hybrid capacity, dividing the week between remote and in-office work in our Kansas City office.

What You’ll Do

Lead the creation of account related documentation, such as proposals and contracts
Serve as the main point-of-contact on all assigned projects
Guide collaboration and coordination across cross-functional teams
Organize, schedule, and steer product-specific meetings
Create and maintain product specific documents such as velocity charts and agile roadmaps
Lead collaboration with the client and internal team members to develop and implement product strategies consistent with the client company vision
Facilitate and participate in discovery and strategy sessions with the client and internal team members, as needed
Provide creative and timely recommendations to generate effective results
Suggest ways to track product use and impact on end users
Provide timely and technically accurate communication to clients on behalf of the production team
Effectively guide product releases, while accounting for risk mitigation and rollback strategies
Lead efforts to estimate and define engagement duration based on information provided by potential or existing clients
Collect and analyze feedback from customers, clients, stakeholders, and other teams to shape requirements, features and end products
Create and facilitate user story creation for small, medium and large feature sets
Lead story-point estimation sessions for all engagements under your management
Lead sprint retrospectives, sprint planning, and tracking velocity of sprints towards releases

Your Knowledge

Proven experience as a product manager or similar role
You have demonstrated understanding of the techniques and methods of modern product discovery and product delivery
You are familiar with the digital product industry and trends
You have a high level understanding of modern web technologies, such as component driven development, TypeScript, Docker
You have experience with the philosophy of agile software development
You are experienced in facilitating Scrum and Kanban methodologies
You keep up with current user experience and technology trends
You have worked with design thinking frameworks and/or other problem solving frameworks
You understand delivery strategies for digital products
You keep up with product management best practices
You have experience working within the product lifecycle management
You have experience facilitating effective sprint ceremonies including standups, backlog refinement, story pointing, sprint planning, sprint demos, and retrospectives
You have experience owning product-related decisions during agile development, including user stories, epics, and themes
You have experience with user-driven research and methodologies
You have basic business & technical acumen
You have demonstrated ability to learn multiple functional areas of business – engineering, design, finance, sales, or marketing
You have demonstrated ability to figure out solutions to hard problems with many constraints

Your Skills

You have strong project management skills
You have strong written, verbal and non-verbal communication
You are able to guide effective asynchronous communication and collaboration
You have a proven ability to engage with engineers, designers, and company leaders in a constructive and collaborative relationship
You can accurately use and maximize our product management tools (Jira, Confluence, Miro)
You can communicate the benefits, drawbacks, usefulness, and effectiveness of various technologies using “non-technical” jargon
You can guide the client and internal team to create products that deliver results through the objectives and business outcomes
You can forecast resources based on capacity
You are able to handle account and/or customer management/service
You can successfully facilitate meetings, particularly with distributed guests

Your Abilities

You are able to communicate technically complex concepts to a wide range of experience levels
You are open to giving and receiving feedback
You can learn from and teach others
You are detail-oriented
You are a self-starter
You are empathetic
You are organized and have good personal time management
You are a proactive critical thinker and problem solver
You can act as a servant leader to internal teams and client partners
You are analytical

Experience

Experience as the primary point of contact with clients and/or stakeholders from external organizations, or, Agency experience.
Experience using agile methodologies, best practices, and critical tools. Experience leading, teaching and mentoring team members in agile.
Experience leading and coaching cross-functional teams, while working on multi-faceted products for extended periods of time.
Experience in enterprise product development and stakeholder management.
Experience or familiarity in backend development is a plus, though not required.
Demonstrated capabilities in being tech, business, and UX savvy.
Experience with the Scrum methodology. Certification as a Scrum Master (CSM) is a plus, though not required.
Embodies and reflects the Crema values in both thought and practice: Results-Based, Trust, Constant Improvement, Generosity, and Collaboration.

About Crema

Crema is a digital product agency that designs and builds custom software. We believe that the best products are built by small, cross-disciplined teams. Click here to learn more about what it’s like to work at Crema, including a look at our culture and benefits.

For this role, the salary range is $120,267 - $138,380. Our salary benchmark is based on companies with 51 to 250 employees, within the software industry, using the target percentile of 50% of market data. This data comes from a third-party service called Culpepper, and we use this data for everyone, no matter where you live in the US.

Crema does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

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