Product Manager - Technical Operations
The candidate will be responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of the platform and pre-emptively flagging operations issues before they impact users. As the bridge between the technical team and the business, the candidate will use monitoring tools to track the proper creation of database records on the platform and escalate to the technical team. In addition, the candidate will be the primary point person for all technical issues encountered by the Canadian business staff.
To be successful in this role, the candidate would need to have a healthy dose of curiosity and thrive on identifying issues with new and existing features, thereby ensuring the efficiency of the platform and smooth user workflows. The candidate will need to be a team player in order to effectively interact with a broad spectrum of TradeCafé stakeholders, including business operations staff, programmers, and QA team members to track to completion the progress of user-acceptance testing. Further, the candidate will need to be adaptable and proactive in order to drive results as the platform usage increases.
● Product Discovery & Delivery. You must be able to gather work items for the technical team. This can be a combination of talking directly with customers, working on defects reported by QA, or analyzing competitors or the market. PMs should also understand how current users are utilizing their applications and recognize opportunities for improvement, through the use of product analysis tools. You must ensure that the entire team can create and maintain a prolific development lifecycle in order to constantly deliver new features and improvements. Product managers must be actively capturing, cataloging and prioritizing development work products from all available sources and deliver on these items in a timely manner.
● Product Strategy & Roadmap. Analyze current market conditions, customer needs, and competitor positions to formulate a long term strategy for the product. This strategy should also be manifested in the product feature roadmap and align with the company strategy. It is critical that PMs measure and iterate on each new feature and compare the results of the implementation to the initial expectations. You must formulate an expert understanding of market conditions and intuitively understand what drives the customer. Your vision and direction for the product must be realistic, achievable, and measurable while also hitting company targets.
● Ongoing monitoring. You are the first point of contact for staff users regarding operational issues through effectively monitoring operations dashboard (Jagear), database dashboards (Tableau), and API integration work flows and associated issues
● Product Communication. You should develop a cadence of constant weekly communication to internal stakeholders liaising with the implementation team on issues faced by platform participants. You should ensure that everyone is aware of changes, new features, and create the necessary materials to support each stakeholder group.
● Product Revenue Growth. You should be intimately aware of the product deficiencies and be actively working on alleviating those pain points. You should also be working closely with all customer acquisition groups to increase the customer acquisition rate and monthly incremental revenue. The success criteria for this metric is revenue growth.
● Coordinating Fixes. By narrowing down the actual cause(s) of and triaging issues identified by platform users. Raising service (AWS) issues with support and architecture teams when they occur. Identify manual or scripted adjustments needed to rectify database issues when appropriate (MongoDB). Coordinate preventative fixes with the programming team and QA. Working with business staff on process driven issues.
● Product Leadership. Product managers are responsible for executing the “blocking and tackling” tasks of the job, however there are other emotional and nuanced aspects of product management which are equally important.
Expected to exhibit the following characteristics:
○ Resilience & persistence - Our product managers are expected to have the resilience and persistence necessary to overcome the early stage challenges
and shepherd their products to measurable success.
○ Initiative & Proactiveness - You cannot wait to be directed on what needs to change or what work should be done.
○ Enthusiasm - Passion and excitement are prerequisites for success in early stage product development.
○ Creativity - Our product managers are expected to think outside the box and come up with unique ways of propelling their products forward and
ahead of the competition.