Enterprise Practice Lead; Product Mgmt; Remote from

Overview

The Governor's Office of Information Technology (OIT) is a dynamic, collaborative organization that seeks to improve the lives of Coloradans through innovative technology solutions. OIT partners directly with state agencies to design, deliver, and continuously improve services—building first‑of‑its‑kind applications while fostering an inclusive, community‑focused culture.

• Define and maintain backlog standards, story‑writing conventions, prioritization frameworks, and planning cadence expectations that apply across all pods, grounded in outcome orientation, not activity tracking.
• Establish tooling standards: which tools to use, how they’re configured, and what consistency looks like across the portfolio without locking teams into configurations that don’t serve their context. Lean in on AI.
• Translate EA product principles into practical guidance that can apply in specific agency contexts without needing to interpret enterprise strategy themselves.
• Identify patterns of practice weakness across the portfolio: backlogs driven by stakeholder requests rather than user needs, prioritization that is implicit rather than documented, and product ownership effectively outsourced to a vendor. Design systemic responses to each pattern.
• Develop the Colorado equivalent of 18F’s product framing discipline: shared tools like problem statements, product vision documents, and success metric frameworks that everyone can use to ground their work in outcomes.
• Run a product management guild: regular convenings, peer critique, shared retrospectives, and the informal culture of a discipline that takes its craft seriously.
• Develop a career pathway and competency framework that creates legible growth from early‑career through senior practitioner, drawing on GDS’s Digital and Data Capability Framework as a reference point.
• Build and deliver training programs that build sustainable, statewide capability through ongoing investment in modern product practice rather than one‑time workshops, and guiding the mindset shift from requirements‑gathering to outcome‑ownership.
• Create and maintain shared resources that practitioners across pods can adapt without starting from scratch, such as templates, playbooks, and examples of strong backlogs and prioritization rationale.
• Advise ITDs on professional development needs and craft performance: what good looks like at a given level, how to give meaningful feedback, and how to recognize when a backlog problem is a skill gap versus a structural or stakeholder‑management problem.
• Distinguish between a practitioner skill gap, a pod structural problem, and an agency partnership problem, and advise accordingly.
• Surface patterns of weak research practice across pods that point to a training or standards gap rather than individual performance.

• Knowledge of product management at a deep practitioner level: backlog ownership, prioritization frameworks (value vs. effort, now/next/later, RICE), outcome‑based road mapping, OKR development, and what it means to govern a product rather than a project.
• Knowledge of Agile and iterative delivery: how sprint planning, refinement, reviews, and retrospectives work, and what good participation in each looks like across the product lifecycle from discovery through live.
• Knowledge of user‑centered product development: how research findings from service designers become backlog inputs, how to distinguish what users need from what stakeholders request, and how to maintain that distinction under pressure.
• Knowledge of State government technology context: how Colorado agencies plan, budget, and make technology investment decisions, sufficient to set standards that work inside legislative, procurement, and political constraints.
• Knowledge of tooling ecosystems for product management (e.g., Jira, Air Table, Figma, Miro) and the ability to configure and standardize them across a distributed delivery portfolio.
• Knowledge of career pathway design: what a product management competency framework looks like across levels from entry‑level to senior practitioner, and how to build growth paths that don’t require leaving the discipline.
• Knowledge of the…