Senior Product Manager; Remote from

Senior Product Manager – Overview

The Senior Product Manager serves as the interface between the agency’s mission and the delivery pod’s work. The position is responsible for deciding what gets built and why, ensuring the pod is always working on the highest-priority items. Unlike a traditional business analyst or project coordinator, this is a prioritization role, not a requirements‑gathering role. The Senior Product Manager owns the product backlog, runs planning cycles, and grounds every decision in user research and outcome‑based metrics.

• Write and maintain a well‑groomed backlog using outcome‑oriented user stories; draft initial backlogs for RFPs that translate problem spaces into indicative user stories.
• Apply prioritization frameworks such as Value vs. Effort or "Now/Next/Later" to make and defend decisions.
• Proactively manage scope by saying "no" clearly and constructively to work that does not serve the current priority, ensuring stakeholders are informed and aligned.
• Run essential agile planning cycles, including sprint planning, refinement, reviews, and retrospectives.
• Conduct quarterly roadmap conversations with agency leadership to align long‑term goals with delivery capacity.
• Regularly update IT Director and agency program staff about status in terms of outcomes rather than activity.
• Partner with Service Designers to interpret journey maps, blueprints, and problem frames and translate these into actionable backlog inputs.
• Define and track objectives and key results (OKRs) and success metrics; evaluate and communicate when shipped features fail to deliver expected outcomes.
• Build the agency staff’s product ownership capacity over time, so the agency becomes a stronger partner rather than a dependent.
• Manage the product’s lifecycle from discovery through continuous improvement.
• Collaborate deeply with engineering to validate technical architecture decisions and with the Delivery Engineer on build/buy/SaaS evaluations.

• Knowledge of product management fundamentals, including backlog ownership, user story writing, prioritization frameworks, and governance of a product rather than a project.
• Knowledge of agile planning and development cycles: sprint planning, refinement, reviews, and retrospectives.
• Knowledge of user‑centered design principles to work productively with Service Designers.
• Knowledge of Colorado state agency program context and how agencies deliver services and structure priorities.
• Knowledge of the product lifecycle from discovery through continuous improvement.
• Awareness of build/buy/SaaS tradeoff space, common state IT patterns, and how technology investment decisions are made and funded.
• Ability to define and develop meaningful success metrics that go beyond delivery activity toward mission impact.
• Ability to decline work that doesn’t serve current priorities and document that decision for stakeholders.
• Ability to communicate product status in terms of outcomes, not just progress.
• Ability to facilitate stakeholder conversations that produce ranked decisions, not a list of any and all desired items.
• Ability to distinguish user needs from stakeholder wants and bring stakeholders into alignment.
• Ability to operate in the space between agency program staff and the pod, avoiding passive translation.
• Ability to own the product’s success metrics and honestly track them when a shipped feature under performs.
• Ability to adapt communication style and level of detail to the audience.

• A minimum of five (5) years of experience in technology product management, including leading cross‑functional teams using iterative, user‑centered methods.
• A track record of working across disciplines—design, engineering, policy, or operations—to ship products that work for real people.

Additional appropriate education will substitute for the required experience on a year‑for‑year basis, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications. Training or certification related to the work assigned to the position will be assigned credit toward substitution for experience and/or education, but cannot completely substitute for these qualifications. If the…