Manager, Product Management

_Manager, Product Management__Location  - UK_WHO WE ARE Certinia delivers a Services-as-a-Business platform that powers and connects all aspects of services operations, from services estimation and delivery to customer success management and financial planning and accounting. The company’s Professional Services Automation (PSA), Customer Success (CS), and Financial Management (FM) solutions—delivered on Salesforce’s leading cloud platform—provide the ability to run a connected services business, deliver with intelligence, and achieve business agility. Headquartered in Austin, Texas with presence around the world, Certinia is backed by Haveli Investments, TA Associates, General Atlantic and Salesforce Ventures. For more information, visit www.certinia.com. THE ROLE The Certinia team is looking for a Manager within Product Management to join their expanding organisation, which provides business software solutions on the Salesforce platform. There are three core elements of this role:

• You will manage other Product Managers, providing guidance and coaching to ensure their success and professional development.
• You will work with the other Managers across the team to drive alignment in the solutions that we’re building and the processes that we use.
• You will be an active voice influencing product strategy and investment, justifying your recommendation based on customer and market knowledge.
• You will lead product vision through to delivery to deliver powerful, intelligent yet simple-to-use solutions that let our customers run the best professional services organisations on the planet.

This position requires you to be an experienced Product Manager with effective time management skills. WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS ROLELine Management:

• Manage and maintain a team of Product Managers
• Support these Product Managers with both Product Management and domain expertise
• Encourage sharing of constructive feedback amongst the team as part of reviews and retrospectives, involving team members from other functional areas, e.g., Engineering, UX, Content, etc as necessary
• Drive the Performance Feedback loop - have regular 1-2-1's with the team members, delivering recognition and feedback, discussing development opportunities and support needs, and taking on board suggestions for improvements
• Have career progression discussions - setting objectives and timescales for achievement to help with progression to new roles and levels
• Identify and utilise coaching and mentoring opportunities with members of the team to aid their knowledge and progression
• Participate in the hiring process, including interviewing and being involved in the decision making process leading to employment offers
• Identify and recommend training needs for team members
• Participate in Employee Success processes, as well as providing input into processes such as promotions, etc.

Product Management:

• The key elements of this are described in the section below

Drive strategy:

• Own the strategy for your part of the product - which is typically aligned to a key customer persona
• Influence overall product strategy by sharing your insights into customers needs
• Collaborate with leadership to drive strategic investments and specific customer needs in parallel
• Work with engineering and design partners to define the shared OKRs for your team, ensuring strategy meets practice

Discovery & Delivery:

• Own the discovery and delivery objectives for your assigned domain
• Develop a rich understanding of customer needs in your problem space through customer interviews, stakeholder interviews, usage metrics data, and customer ideas
• Partner with the design and engineering leads in your team to explore potential solutions and test these to discover the best solution
• Work with your team to iteratively deliver the highest value solution to our customers.  Expect to learn, adapt and iterate on the fly
• Draw on support from your experienced peers and discipline leads across Product Management, design and engineering 
• Own the responsibility for ensuring that features are ready to ship

Engage with customers:

• Customers are at the heart of everything we do. You will be empowered to collaborate fully with customers to gain a deep understanding of their goals and challenges. Bringing insights and opportunities back to the wider team to explore new solutions   
• Go To Market:
• Collaborate with key customers to help them adopt and go-live with the latest versions of the product, including capabilities which you helped shape, design and deliver
• Help train our sales, services and support teams so they can make customers successful
• Present new functionality to customers and partners as part of the new release process at webinars, our conference and occasionally one on one

WHAT YOU NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE

• A desire for; People Management - to develop individuals as well as developing own coaching and mentoring skills
• Outstanding interpersonal relationship building and stakeholder management skills
• Demonstrable experience communicating with individuals and teams from both technical and commercial backgrounds
• Extensive and demonstrable experience as a Senior Product Manager
• A proven understanding of modern Product Management practices, such as Opportunity Canvases, User Story Maps, Objectives and Key Results, Lean UX, rapid prototyping and storyboarding
• Experience working on enterprise software products and a working knowledge of the constraints and opportunities that this implies 
• A hunger and ability to learn quickly and work through ambiguity to create clarity
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to both listen and lead
• Product design, analytical and problem solving skills
• Experience working in an Agile environment
• Strong attention to detail
• A global mindset - we are a global company with global customers

WHAT ELSE WOULD BE GREAT

• Previous people management experience
• Knowledge of the Salesforce platform, Apex, Visualforce and Lightning Frameworks are a strong plus
• An understanding of Professional Services organizations and personas we are serving with our solution/s
• Knowledge of the “business of services” from Sales to Service Delivery to Finance across the customer lifecycle at an enterprise level
• Previous experience working on on Certinia solutions and products is highly desirable
• Experience navigating the strengths and limitations of a platform architecture