Director, Product

This Director of Product role is responsible for a portfolio of products spanning Data Engineering across all of Pie, and Business Systems for the Finance and Claims journeys.

For Data Engineering, they need to drive the product vision that shifts us from a reactive, feature-request mode of operation to one in which the Product team leverages deep knowledge of the most important areas of the business to form a perspective on where BI and analytics capabilities can enable more data-driven decisions. Additionally, they must partner with engineering to ensure we are investing in our data infrastructure, which is the lifeblood of our BI/Analytics capabilities, while refining the scope and responsibilities for the Product Management function within the data domain.

Additionally, they must define a novel operating model for how product management will interact with third party business systems that were not built internally. This is a non-traditional team configuration, but one which is important for Pie’s success given substantial portions of our business operations, and insured/Agent/Pie-oneer experiences, are influenced by our third party business systems. As part of this, they must take shared accountability for ensuring the success of the platform roll-outs/ramp-ups for Billing, Finance, and Claims workflows.

Lastly, the Director of Product must apply their critical thinking and thought leadership to these areas in a way that is collaborative and transparent to all those who interact with them. They should be viewed as highly capable and trustworthy strategic thought partner.

Key Outcomes For First 12 Months

• Lead the successful roll-out of the Finance & Billing platform to support key non-premium revenue initiatives and scale Commercial Auto, ensuring alignment with company objectives.
• Oversee the roll-out of Claims operations, including state-specific milestones, to improve claim turnaround times and enhance customer satisfaction.
• Develop a strategic roadmap identifying the largest potential growth opportunities across the product portfolio over the next 12 months, with a focus on prioritizing key opportunities and setting clear impact targets for the next 6-12 months.
• Define and implement an operating model that incorporates Product Management processes (e.g., sprint ceremonies, backlog grooming) into business systems, tailoring approaches to fit third-party platform integrations.
• Foster strong, collaborative relationships with technology peers and Director+ level commercial partners, ensuring high levels of trust and transparency in delivering on shared goals.

How You’ll Do It

• Critical thinking & problem solving
• Develop 12+ month product strategy across their portfolio of products (e.g., decision-making frameworks, systematic problem exploration, outcome definition and measurement) and coaches others on how to do the same
• Builds and continuously reinforces deep insurance and business domain expertise, with a strong command of the end-to-end value chain of Pie's business. Proactively seeks & stays close to user sentiment and feedback trends, along with broader competitive landscape and industry trends.
• Proactively recognizing when processes or goals are misaligned with high-value outcomes, and taking corrective actions
• Understands technical fundamentals of how multiple product and/or business domains interact, anticipates potential conflicts or synergies, and takes action to mitigate risk or maximize value
• Ensures their teams have quantitative and qualitative processes for capturing feedback, and regularly get close to users / problems
• Makes complex decisions with minimal oversight, acting as the primary product leader accountable for decision-making, quality-control, and results delivery for their domain of ownership
• Cross-functional execution
• Creates alignment around shared objectives and facilitates adoption of enabling work among other teams; monitors progress and proactively addresses misalignment
• Recognizes and proactively communicates when expectations must be shifted, priorities adjusted, etc. to better optimize for overall business value
• Guides their team to set clear and ambitious goals that drive significant business value; accepts responsibility for team performance and outcomes, regardless of circumstances
• Refining product strategy into relevant suite of impacts that align cross-functional execution with key business outcomes; works with team members to refine and evolve measures over time
• Optimizes speed-to-value across their product domain by creatively addressing dependencies, removing blockers, and maintaining focus on a manageable set of priorities
• People Management
• Attracting, recruiting and evaluating Product,  Engineering, and Design talent as part of hiring panels
• Regular meetings with direct reports to provide coaching, feedback, and guidance (1x1s, development meetings, problem-solving sessions)
• Formal performance management processes including calibrations, written performance summaries, etc.
• Influencing and Communication
• Building high-trust relationships with senior leaders across the business to serve as a trusted advisor and thought partner
• Evangelizing a compelling vision for their product domain to educate and inspire buy-in across the organization
• Distilling complex information across multiple domains into a synthesized, well-supported structure that informs and makes the case for action
• Facilitating or leading large cross-functional meetings with stakeholders of any seniority level

The Right Stuff

• 10+ years overall professional experience working on complex business and/or technology problems 
• 5+ years Product Management experience working in an agile software development lifecycle (SDLC) environment
• 3+ years experience managing direct reports performing complex knowledge work. Must include at least 1+ years managing product managers.
• Advanced communication (written, verbal and presentation) skills, to distill complex information effectively and in alignment with the needs of the audience.
• Advanced problem solving skills and track record of demonstrated "first-principles" based thinking. Able to manage complex situations with multiple layers, and resolve to solution anticipating needs now and into the future
• Advanced understanding of continuous product discovery methodologies, including interviews, ethnographic research, job shadowing, passive feedback collection (e.g., surveys, product usage analytics), prototyping, etc.
• Advanced awareness of workflow, and project tradeoffs to make decisions based on needs now and into the future
• Advanced leadership knowledge, and ability to build, develop and coach the team and manage the overall group/team workflow to successful deliverables/outcomes
• Demonstrated ability to influence strategic direction
• Advanced understanding of modern software development tools, processes, and architecture patterns; knows how to strike a balance between business needs and the scope of software engineering solutions
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple project deliverables, making decisions and understanding tradeoffs, and create processes for efficiency and effective product delivery for their team and broader cross-functional delivery coalitions
• Demonstrated mastery of synthesizing understanding of a given market in terms of key user segments and value sizing, jobs to be done, competitive offerings, and target opportunities for differentiated value creation.               
• Mastery of quantitative analysis across all areas of the business
• High level skillset in program management tools, and project mapping
• High level technical skills and mastery of the industry to mitigate complicated issues and manage multiple complex deliverables simultaneously
• G-Suite Tools, Collaboration tools (slack is preferred), basic office machines, Atlassian SDLC suite (Jira, Confluence, etc.)
• Proficient with Looker or other relevant analytics tools