Senior Software Product Manager - HE Portal

Sr Software Product Manager - HE Portal

Job ID: 2013-17920
# of Positions: 1
Posted Date: 6/25/2013
Job Location: US-MA-Boston
Position Type: Regular Full Time
Category: Product Management

Overview

Pearson has one defining goal: to help people progress in their lives through learning. We champion innovation and we invest in models for education that deliver on our promise for effective, accessible, and personal learning from early literacy, college and career readiness to professional education, through data informed instruction and inventive applications for mobile and digital learning.

Pearson, the world's leading learning company, has global-reach and market leading businesses in education, business, and consumer publishing and is listed on the London and New York stock exchanges (UK: PSON; NYSE: PSO).

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer, and a member of E-Verify. All qualified applicants, including minorities, women, veterans, and people with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

The Sr. Software Product Manager for the Higher Ed Portal is responsible for planning, designing, and managing the development of the Higher Ed Portal and reports to the Executive Product Manager.

This position will oversee all phases of development, from gathering customer input and requirements through user interface design and specification writing to quality assurance testing. This person will exercise independent judgment in methods, techniques and evaluation criteria for obtaining results, work on significant and unique issues or problems that require an in-depth knowledge of Identity and Access Management, as well as Learning Management Systems and users thereof and how it inter-relates to other educational software and products.

Responsibilities include:
- Facilitate requirements gathering sessions with internal partners to understand, document and prioritize detailed user needs to inform solution development activities
- Clearly articulate customer and user needs to Agile teams through user stories and a well-groomed product backlog
- Collaborate daily with developers, project managers, user experience designers and QA analysts to support definition, design, development and testing of new product functionality
- Synthesize multiple streams of market and customer information to understand and communicate requirements and priorities to both management and teams
- Conduct compelling product and feature demonstrations to a variety of internal and external audiences that convey product and subject matter expertise
- Provide product and market expertise to internal users and sales force to support client engagements, sales processes and issue resolution
- Prioritize and target issues as they are reported
- Create and evolve internal processes to improve organizational efficiencies
- Collaborate with other Product Managers to insure consistency across-team
- Communicate to internal stakeholders and partners the product plans and roadmap
- Track and prioritize software feature requests
- Define the business case for specific feature requirements
- Research user needs and expectations for specific feature requirements
- Write use cases; functional specifications; and test plans for specific feature requirements
- Perform acceptance and ad-hoc functional testing of new features
- Collaborate with staff or freelance designers and team members to develop a cohesive user interface for new features
- Conduct (or assist with) usability testing, user development conferences, and focus groups
- Monitor and review the development of specific features including software engineering, QA, and documentation

Relocation is not available for this position.

Qualifications

Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree required or equivalent work experience
- 5+ years applicable experience in software product management/product ownership

Skills/knowledge/abilities:
- Passion for and/or experience with improving Higher Education
- Excellent written communication and presentation skills
- Solid grounding in enterprise software technologies with proven ability to work closely with development teams on product design and maintenance
- Strong interpersonal skills with a focus on teamwork and the ability to foster/maintain relationships internally and externally
- Excellent project management and organizational skills with ability to gather business and functional requirements
- Strong quantitative analytical skills and sharp business acumen
- Agile SCRUM experience a plus
- Ability to remain effective in a fast-paced environment
- This person must be able to sit or stand at a personal computer for a reasonable length of time typing and reading.
- Ability to handle a high volume of work in a short period of time, handle multiple priorities simultaneously and operate in a demanding work environment is important.
- Reliable attendance and punctuality is critical to successful performance in this role.

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.