Senior Director of Products and Services/Licensing and Permitting

Millions of people interact with the City of Boston digitally each year to do everything from finding information on City services to paying for a parking ticket. We believe these experiences should be easy to navigate and accessible. DoIT is focused on partnering with City departments to improve service delivery across the City. We’re a cross-functional team with a mission to improve the user experience of existing digital services, better engage and communicate with our residents, and build new systems to improve how the City delivers services online. 

The Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) provides and maintains mission-critical technologies for the City’s more than 18,000 employees and the hundreds of thousands of constituents they serve. 

As a Senior Director of Products and Services for Licensing and Permitting, you’ll lead large cross-functional teams to deliver complex user-centered service experiences across multiple work streams using agile methodologies and modern software development practices. You’ll build capacity for product innovation in government. You will influence policy, strategy, and direction at the intersection of people, processes, and systems. You will be a senior leader who is responsible for the strategy and execution of our improvements to the City’s licensing and permitting functions. You’ll be a champion for user needs, with a goal of improving end-to-end user experiences through improvements in technology and service delivery. You’ll partner with City departments, you’ll manage staff, and you’ll manage the strategy, funding, and execution of digital license and permitting innovation. Your ability to communicate with clarity and build enduring working relationships will be embedded into everything you do.

• Act as a strategic leader: be responsible for decisions, policies, and procedures that have a City-wide impact on how the City delivers services to constituents and how the City manages the internal products and services that support this work.
• Keep the product(s) vision, strategy, and roadmap aligned with our services principles, building internal and external buy-in along the way. 
• Remain current with the market of commercially available solutions and guide build vs. buy (or reuse) approaches for components and products that are part of the end-to-end service delivery. 

Stakeholder Management

• Partner with City leadership and contributors from each department to understand their goals and offer strategies for continuous service delivery improvements.
• Collaborate with executive leadership to keep product strategy and organizational priorities in alignment over a two-year time horizon.
• Communicate vision, strategy, and progress to City senior leadership, the City council, the media, and other audiences. 

Delivery

• Lead large (over five people) cross-functional teams (analysts, researchers, designers, technical staff, engineers, etc.) to deliver value to end users.  
• Ensure that across all relevant stakeholders (departments, architects, engineers, content strategists, designers, and researchers, etc.), work is scoped, clear measures of success are defined, acceptance criteria are fulfilled, and that adequate staffing is provided.
• Leverage agile principles and modern design and development practices, ensure all implementation work (research, design, development) delivers value quickly and continuously.
• Define and track key product metrics; use metric targets to inform product evolution.
• Drive procurement initiatives for product components. Work with executive leadership to set and manage procurement budgets.
• Identify and proactively monitor and address product and project risks.
• Drive product launches, including working with communications, executives, and other product development team members.

User Experience

• Ensure a consistent, dignified, and delightful end-to-end user experience across users, products, and channels. 
• Know our end users and utilize user research and other objective data to inform a continually evolving product roadmap. 
• Act as a product evangelist to build awareness and understanding.

Product Operations

• Own responsibility for the strategy and coordinated execution of continuous improvement efforts across the entire City to drive better services.
• Make recommendations and define changes in policies and procedures related to products and services based on data, departmental input, and user research.
• Set and meet quality standards.

Management

• Supervise and coach other staff members.
• Set the staffing needs of the team in consultation with the senior leadership of DoIT.
• Oversee vendor contracts and projects.
• Contribute to short-term and long-term budget planning.
• Stay up to date with expert knowledge of best practices for business operations.

• At least eight (8) years of full-time, or equivalent part-time, professional experience with progressive leadership in a software product management or digital service delivery role or a related field.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills. 
• Experience running and/or shipping digital applications that perform service functions; previous experience with building or managing enterprise level products is preferred.
• Strategic thinking: the ability to define and articulate a multi-year product vision and strategy, along with an ability to build buy-in across the team, our government partners, and other collaborators.
• Leadership experience among cross-functional teams that work collaboratively to build new capabilities.
• Demonstrated track record of entrepreneurial action to identify and pursue opportunities with a high degree of autonomy.
• Experience being accountable for business decisions where ambiguity exists and trade-off choices must be made.
• Experience delivering enterprise software capabilities within large organizations and ensuring the successful adoption of those capabilities into ongoing operations.
• Organizational skills sufficient to manage a dynamic portfolio of work that spans teams, customers, cultures, and technologies.
• Written and verbal communication skills that generate trust and convey complex technical ideas effectively among diverse audiences, particularly at executive levels.
• Understanding of user-centered design methods and usability best practices.
• History of successful delivery of projects following an Agile methodology.
• History of successful partnerships that delivered business value across functional boundaries.
• Strong bias towards action; ability to step up into team gaps and ambiguous situations to structure the team’s action plan.
• Deep knowledge of industry and market trends and the landscape of commercially available solutions that will affect product direction.

BOSTON RESIDENCY REQUIRED - You must live within Boston city limits at the start of your employment.

Terms:

Union/Salary/Grade: Non-Union/MM2-12

Hours per week: 35