Engagement Managers / Product Managers at Mass Digital

Cross-functional (kickball) team

As a Product Manager at Mass Digital, you’ll lead cross-functional teams to deliver user-centered products using agile methodologies and modern software development practices while building capacity for product innovation in government. When you build products with a partner agency, you’ll coach them on modern product development practices so they’re set up for success in the long term.

Product managers on our team are:

• Strategic thinkers who are comfortable defining a compelling vision and designing a measurable strategy to achieve that vision
• Decisive leaders who know how to motivate cross-functional teams to build the right thing
• Comfortable working in a consulting capacity as well as running a product directly
• Empathetic coaches, mentors, and advocates who help partner agency staff develop the skills to manage their own products

Key Objectives

Objective #1: Own or steward the product vision and lead end-to-end product development

You are an experienced product manager who can unite vision and execution to lead an interdisciplinary team in delivering the right value to the right people. You’re skilled at defining a meaningful end goal to galvanize your team, whether that means generating a product vision and strategy with your team or helping agency partners articulate and focus their vision and strategy.

Successful product managers at Mass Digital:

• Establish a vision and ensure all members of the Mass Digital and partner teams have a shared understanding of product objectives, goals, and metrics
• Analyze market demand and market fit, do competitive analysis, and guide build vs. buy or reuse approaches
• Create a product strategy and roadmap and develop a communications strategy supporting product goals
• Identify and proactively monitor and address product risks
• Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, and engineers to ensure the right product is delivered to the right audience
• Work with the team to set and meet quality standards for any product you build
• Use evidence (user research, analytics, and other metrics) to make product decisions, ask “why” a lot, and recognize the difference between “we can’t do that because of bureaucracy” and “we can’t do that because of the law”
• Energize and motivate the team by recognizing successes and learning from failures
• Ensure your product complies with state and federal regulations including Section 508

Objective #2: Work with agency partners to make sure they’re set up for success

As a product manager at Mass Digital, your job isn’t to deliver software; your job is to create sustainable outcomes that benefit the public. You’ll help your partners adopt a modern product development mindset and make sure they have the right team to sustain their product once Mass Digital’s engagement with them is done. You’ll also coach and mentor agency staff, helping them develop into capable product managers in their own right.

Successful product managers at Mass Digital:

• Work with partners to establish in-house product ownership
• Help partners understand how to deliver value, rather than features, to their users
• Help partners navigate complex bureaucratic relationships to bring stakeholders together around a common product vision and strategy
• Coach the partner in agile, open source, and user-centered principles so they understand the value these practices bring
• Ensure the partner understands how to do day-to-day product management by coaching and mentoring junior product managers
• Work with partners to ensure they have the right team to continue iterating on the product beyond the engagement
• Work with partners to establish relationships with their security, operations, and IT teams that will help sustain the product in the long term
• Work with partners to develop communications strategies to sustain the product during and beyond the engagement

Objective #3: Build institutional expertise around product management

As a member of Mass Digital, you’ll share best practices and tools with your peers across the organization. You’ll collaborate and share insights and opinions with other product managers, contributing to our growing culture of product management. You’ll share lessons learned from your work at Mass Digital with peers and leaders to help guide our approach to digital transformation.

Successful product managers at Mass Digital:

• Keep abreast of product management best practices and bring them back into the organization
• Stay on top of new technologies and how they could help solve government problems
• Speak at conferences to talk about Mass Digital’s work and share our mission
• Contribute to Mass Digital’s culture of transparency by publishing accounts of your successes and failures
• Continually seek out new product management tools that could improve the way we work
• Pay attention to well-supported open source product offerings that can be reused in a government context to solve common problems (so that we help agencies not build custom tools if not needed)

What we’re looking for:

• Experience as a Product Manager of a cross-functional team
• Experience running and/or shipping custom consumer web applications
• Ability to generate very strong product plans and build buy-in across the team, our government partners, and other contractors
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for technical, user experience, and project management trade-offs; enthusiastic communicator
• Strong bias towards action; ability to step up into team gaps and ambiguous situations to structure the team’s action plan
• Ability to execute with incomplete information; great product instincts and an ability to create order from divergent needs
• Ability to define a product objective, and logically reverse engineer the path and communications to achieve the objective
• Ability to identify market trends and shifts that will affect product direction, and updating plans based on future expectations
• An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative, and positive mindset

Executive Order #595 requires Executive Department employees to have received COVID-19 vaccination or to have been approved for exemption as a condition of employment. Finalists will be given details about how to demonstrate receipt of vaccination or request an exemption due to a sincerely held religious belief or if the vaccine is medically contraindicated.