Director of Product – Ontario, Canada

 

Director of Product

  • JOB ID: 3293
  • Ontario, Canada

Our client takes the uncertainty and bias out of the hiring process. Their pre-hire assessments provide actionable insights into a candidate’s personality, cognitive, and behavioural attributes and predict both their chances of success within a role and within the culture of an organization.

Their core tenets are more than just buzzwords. Their guiding principles of accountability, teamwork, transparency, balance, and respect are built into every aspect of the company from the relationships they create with their clients to the care with which they build and test their assessments.

This position will ideally be based in the Greater Toronto Area, Kitchener/Waterloo or Ottawa.

People Management

  • Managing the team: organizing people (3 – 5 person team) around the product & design tasks
  • Managing the team: organizing people, managing career advice, negotiating raises, vacation, etc.
  • Responsible for team’s career development
  • Provide detailed guidance, feedback and direction to designer
  • Apply industry standard product management strategy frameworks to support the team

As Product Leader…

Technical Leadership

  • Take ownership of all common product initiatives
  • Establish and maintain product roadmap
  • Prioritize product initiatives with input from internal stakeholders and clients, using KPIs to evaluate and understand product value
  • Engage with business, marketing, customer success and engineering leaders to drive product discovery
  • Engage with clients to collect product development insights and feedback, through customers interviews, surveys, product webinars and more
  • Collaborate with designer to create low and medium fidelity wireframes, collaborate to 2
  • Responsibility for the final, big picture architecture of our software stack
  • Auditing and reviewing work of the technical team to identify risks, mistakes, and conformance with expectations and specifications

Product Launch Support & Operations

  • Preparing releases, managing the release process – change logs, notifications, etc.
  • Work with stakeholders and internal team for testing and launch checklists
  • Assemble training materials and video walkthroughs of new product launches

Research and Development

  • Conduct competitive research to determine key insights, best-in-class industry examples and propose actionable projects from insights
  • Regularly present insights and research findings to internal stakeholders
  • Work with designer to discover and apply experimental designs
  • Exploring new techniques and technologies for growth
  • Exploring and redesigning psychometrics, report content, etc for future product requirements and long term maintainability

QA

Director, Product is ultimately responsible for:

  • Testing and final sign off
  • Test plan management
  • Developing test automation (reflect)

Shared with Director, Software Engineering –

Software Development Methodology

  • Defining the software development practices that the organization will follow
  • We’re an agile/scrum shop, 2 weeks sprints, some elements of Shape Up
  • Run stand-up, sprint planning and retrospectives
  • Act as “Scrum master”
  • Organizing and tracking work – writing stories/tickets, cleaning up old tickets
  • Ultimate responsibility for this falls with Director, Product – but can and should be influenced and implemented by both the Director and Director, Software Engineering.

Strategy

  • Ideate, test and iterate intelligent software interaction models and visual interfaces
  • Collaborate with engineers during product discovery, planning and development phases of projects
  • Create user stories and epics on JIRA
  • Reach consensus with the team regarding implementation strategy
  • Work with engineers to determine trade-offs in terms of complexity, depth and timelines
  • Work with designer for consistency in design components and user experience
  • Manage expectations of internal and stakeholders by effectively prioritizing resources
  • Use data from Mixpanel and SQL database queries to make product and design decisions
  • Employ a MVP mindset to phase out releases and learn from user interactions
  • Keep up to date with new and upcoming product, engineering and design frameworks
  • Present digestible findings and action plans to internal stakeholders

What your day-to-day at will look like…

  • Engaging with business, marketing, customer success, and engineering team members to drive product development and product strategy in areas related to existing offerings and new markets
  • Taking ownership of all product elements
  • Engaging with our clients to collect product development insights and feedback, via customer interviews, surveys, training videos and product webinars.
  • Building and nurturing relationships with engineers on technical details, understanding the implications of certain decisions, and trade-offs in terms of complexity, depth, and timelines.
  • Collaborating with our designer to ideate, test, iterate and implement intelligent software interaction models and visual interfaces.
  • Prioritizing and sequencing deliverables using JIRA, product roadmaps and release timelines to support the growth of products and business units.
  • Distilling very technical concepts to business users and vice versa.
  • Conducting research to identify, and adapt to, industry trends and competitive factors.
  • Defining, measuring, and monitoring key performance indicators to evaluate and understand product value.

You will thrive at with our client if you have…

  • 5+ years of demonstrated success in Product Management roles at SaaS software companies
  • Platform Strategy & Integrations (25%)
  • User interview / User Interaction / User Experience (20%);
  • Product Strategy / Planning, Sprint Planning, Roadmap, Product Discovery (30%)
  • Competitive Research (25%)
  • Love keeping up to date with new and upcoming product, engineering and design frameworks
  • Can manage expectations of internal and external stakeholders by effectively prioritizing resources, working, and negotiating product / project needs;
  • Are data-driven – create/understand analytics frameworks & user flows;
  • Have a growth background (product growth – MVP launch, scaleup/out; alignment with existing platform) with an experimentation mindset
  • Are an excellent communicator with a collaborative attitude
  • Can present digestible information to stakeholders
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience in Engineering, Computer Science, Design or a related field of study

Bonus Points…

  • Experience in HR tech space
  • This is a remote position with occasional meetup’s at head office in downtown Toronto situated closely to Union Station and the Island Airport.

Contact: Kevin Suitor – ksuitor@rostie.com or (289) 482-1316