Product Manager, PLAY

Our USA TODAY PLAY games experience has a highly engaged following and broad audience reach with its challenging and inclusive daily crosswords and other puzzles. We are looking for a product management professional to help develop our rapidly expanding portfolio. You will add new capabilities and features to optimize the playing experience on existing games and will develop new puzzles and games to delight our current players and attract new ones. You'll report to the Director of Product, Games Experience, and partner with leaders across the organization, including Marketing, Data Intelligence, Engineering, and UX, to build and execute an ambitious roadmap centered on exponentially growing our portfolio and audience. The ideal candidate will be passionate not just about games but about creating great product experiences that deliver impact to business and audience goals. He/she will have a bias toward action, taking on new opportunities and tough challenges with a sense of urgency, high energy, and enthusiasm. The ideal candidate will be as passionate about crafting great products as they are about setting a new high score.

• Translate business and content criteria and objectives into clearly defined requirements that populate a robust roadmap and articulate a product strategy.
• Analyze performance metrics, measure success , and use this data to identify new product opportunities that will build habit-forming engagement among users to play more frequently and subscribe to premium experiences.
• Partner with the engineering and design teams to define user stories, acceptance criteria, prioritize, and conduct user acceptance testing.
• Create intuitive and fun experiences for puzzles and games through continuous experimentation and iteration.

• 5+ years of product management experience
• Bachelor's degree
• An ability to address both user and business needs, creating product solutions.
• Deep experience with agile software development methodology.
• Firm understanding of relevant web design and development technologies to translate business requirements to engineering teams.
• Experience using data and metrics to independently test theories, confirm assumptions, and measure success with attention to detail.
• A highly motivated self-starter who can work effectively across cross-functional teams and also make things happen on their own.
• A strong communicator with excellent written and verbal skills.
• A team player and fun to work with. Loves to share inspiration and new ideas with your direct and indirect teams.