Director of Product Management

Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and coach less senior product managers.
• Nurture a product management mindset by promoting best practices and a culture of learning and continuous improvement across Bixal.
• Be a thought leader by confidently and articulately presenting at conferences, and webinars, writing white papers and publishing blogs.
• Solve problems and help others to iteratively adapt by planning for and embracing change internally and externally.   
• Manage utilization for product management team and lead recruiting for new roles as needed.
• Creates value through collaboration and is responsive to business development opportunities, integrating with other disciplines, multidisciplinary teams, and leadership to drive holistic product excellence.
• Brings “glass half full,” aspirational mentality; avoids perfectionist tendencies during pursuit of incremental or modular progress.

Product Design and Development

• Serve as the advocate and champion for the product, ensuring its alignment with overarching objectives.
• Foster collaboration among team members and stakeholders through the application of "design thinking," actively driving discussions towards identifying and implementing beneficial product directions.
• Cultivate a deep understanding of customer use cases and pain points, taking personal ownership of product initiatives to continuously measure and elevate customer satisfaction levels.
• Strategically prioritize enhancement requests and craft and maintain a comprehensive product roadmap that serves as both an internal compass and an external guidepost for the product's trajectory.
• Craft the overarching vision, strategy, and model for the ongoing improvement of products while fostering a collective sense of purpose and outcomes-oriented mindset with a steadfast commitment to a people-first approach.
• Proactively advocate for customer needs and product concepts internally and externally, garnering support and fostering adoption across all relevant stakeholders.
• Effectively translate overarching goals and objectives into tangible outputs or user stories, ensuring clarity and alignment for the Bixal project team's implementation efforts.

Consulting

• Combine analytical tools of systems thinking with the innovative approaches of human-centered design to effectively address challenges and deliver added value to our clients.
• Cultivate a profound sense of empathy for our clients and their customers, understanding their unique challenges and leveraging modern digital and data solutions to provide impactful resolutions.
• Direct and coordinate CX research and design teams, orchestrating concept validation exercises, co-creation studies, and user testing initiatives to extract valuable insights and pinpoint customer needs and solutions.
• Actively engage with current and prospective customers to gain deep insights into their critical requirements, collaborating to refine and validate solutions, and offering strategic guidance to shape acquisitions that yield desired outcomes.

Solutioning

• Collaborate directly with senior leadership to proactively drive business development initiatives aimed at expanding Bixal's presence and impact across key areas such as technology, data, human-experience design, digital communications, and organizational development and learning.
• Bridge the gap between people and technology by adeptly translating complex technical concepts into easily understandable language tailored for non-technical audiences.
• Identify and select the most effective technical solutions and approaches to meet anticipated or actual acquisition requirements.
• Play a pivotal role in shaping Bixal's win strategies by leading the development of compelling technical win themes and solution readiness plans, ensuring our proposals stand out for their excellence.
• Provide comprehensive support across all stages of opportunity pursuit, from qualification to capture strategy, fostering customer relationships, managing competitor dynamics, and providing effective team leadership throughout.
• Participate in client events and forums to positively represent the organization and develop and maintain relationships with the industry.
• As appropriate, play an active role in new client acquisition by supporting business development initiatives to enhance and grow Bixal's business in each of the areas that it works.
• Perform other duties or special projects as assigned.  

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree required; master's degree preferred. 
• Ability to undergo and obtain a Public Trust security clearance.  
• 10+ years of total professional experience.
• 5+ years of experience managing cross-functional product teams in positions of increasing complexity and responsibility.  
• 3+ years supporting federal government product initiatives, including familiarity with federal IT standards, software development processes and contract requirements. 
• Demonstrated ability to navigate uncertainty and define product expectations in an environment where product concepts are not well understood. 
• Ability to understand technical challenges and make educated trade-offs with the team and stakeholders.  
• Excellent soft skills: good communicator, emotionally intelligent, empathetic, good follow-up, polite, positive attitude. 
• Proven track record of managing issues and risk through mitigation strategies. 
• Demonstrated history of interfacing with internal project teams and senior management, as well as external clients and other stakeholders.  
• Experience in human-centered design principles and adoption of Agile mindset. 
• Impeccable oral and written communications skills. 
• Sharp attention to detail and excellent organization skills.  
• Strong experience and comfortability with Microsoft Office suite, Keynote, virtual collaboration tools such as Miro, and Adobe Acrobat Pro.  

Nice to haves

• Functional experience architecting digital solutions, covering all layers of the technology stack, from presentation through cybersecurity and accessibility aspects.
• Understanding of event driven, reactive, and micro service architectures and best practices for delivering highly resilient solutions.
• Experience in data architecture, integration, design and delivery.
• Experience working with Agile teams to deliver across the entire product life cycle – concept, design, build (code), deploy, test, release, and maintain unit, functional, and performance test automation.