Product Manager

Product Manager Job Description

Who We Are

STEAMe is a social impact technology based in Chicago. Our purpose is to make it easy for people to qualify for and apply to skills-based jobs in the STEAMe digital workplace so they can increase their lifetime earnings. We provide the digital infrastructure connecting learners to career pathways and ultimately a family sustaining incomes and high-demand jobs. Founded by Dr. Stacy Lindau from University of Chicago and Dr. Nicole Pinkard from Northwestern University, who are experts in empowering communities and building social impact systems to increase access to opportunity, create mobility pathways, and solve high-impact social challenges. 

Product Manager Role

The Product Manager plays an essential role in the creation and continuous improvement of STEAMe products. As a STEAMe Product Manager you will use your keen understanding of stakeholders and market knowledge to shape the direction of our workforce development platform. You will leverage your practical and technical skills to translate and communicate product needs to the engineering team, other cross-functional departments, and customers, to bring industry-changing products to market. 

Responsibilities

• Engage, collaborate and align with stakeholders, client teams and your engineering team to manage expectations, experiment together, and build a cohesive cross-functional strategy.
• Conduct market research to deeply understand our target market, competitors, industry trends, validate our business strategy, and evaluate new customer segments 
• Lead problem discovery and solution discovery through a well rounded toolkit of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
• Collaborate with Product Design to create wireframes and clickable prototypes to illustrate solutions for user validation and release planning. 
• Lead ideation sessions with cross-functional team members, work with product leadership, design and engineering counterparts to plan releases, sprints, and write user stories.
• Assist with quarterly goals and release planning process by working with design and engineering to estimate and prioritize work.
• Collaborate with Marketing on product learnings, GTM communications, and prepare internal staff to support feature success. 
• Measure success of feature releases, communicate findings, and develop objectives for continuous improvement.
• Product roadmap updates and communication
• Acts as a product evangelist for your team’s strategy and overall STEAMe product vision and strategy, keeping the team and stakeholders informed and excited about where we are going.

Qualifications & Requirements

• 3-5 years work experience with 1-2 years of work experience in product management at a software company
• Experience writing product requirements and functional documentation
• Experience with product prioritization, release management, and product development lifecycle
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; a persuasive and passionate communicator
• Outstanding critical thinking and problem-solving skills with ability to take complex problems and distill them into discrete concepts
• Experience working on an Agile software teams and creating jointly owned goals and metrics
• User-centered, must have a flexible approach to understanding your user and developing innovative solutions to improve their experiences
• Data-driven and analytical, must be able to define success metrics and track on-going usage  
• Demonstrated passion for social entrepreneurship or leveraging technology to address social challenges
• Experience with product and project management tools such as Jira, Figma, Confluence, Asana, and others.

Preferred Experience

• Previous work or knowledge in workforce development 
• Previous experience working in B2B2C or on a product with 2 or more user types 
• Experience creating products or features from 0 to 1 
• Quick learner with a commitment to quality who is comfortable navigating ambiguity in a start-up environment.
• Located in driving distance of the Chicago office to work a Hybrid schedule (2 days in office, 3 days remote)

Environmental Job Requirements & Working Conditions

• This position is based in Chicago, IL. and is not eligible for remote work.
• STEAMe is a Hybrid work environment, with 3 days work from home and 2 days in-office work, today on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• All team members will be required to pass a background check which includes criminal, employment, and education verification.

STEAMe is committed to building a diverse team and fostering an inclusive culture, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We embrace and encourage our employees' differences in race, religion, color, national origin, gender, family status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, veteran status, disability, pregnancy, medical conditions, and other characteristics.