Head Of Product Management

A career at CoBank can offer you the opportunity to make a personal impact on the people and communities where we do business. When you choose a career with CoBank, you make a difference by standing for something that matters. In order to be the best, we hire the best! Remarkable Benefits Offered by CoBank Careers with a purpose. Stand for something! Time-Off Packages, boasting over 15 days of vacation, 10 paid sick days and 11 paid holidays Competitive Compensation & Incentive Hybrid work model: flexible arrangements for most positions Benefits Packages, including Medical, Dental and Vision coverage, Disability, AD&D, and Life Insurance Robust associate training and development with CoBank University Tuition reimbursement for higher education up to $10,000 per year Outstanding 401k: up to 6% matching and additional 3% non-elective contribution Community Impact: United Way Angel Day, Volunteer Day and Associate Directed Contribution Associate Resource Groups: creating a culture of diversity and inclusion Recognize a fellow associate through our GEM awards Leads and drives CoBank's product strategy and development efforts. This leader will possess exceptional leadership, vision, and a proven track record of successfully managing and growing an enterprise product portfolio. As an integral part of our executive team, you will play a key role in defining our product portfolio roadmap and support the Product Managers in aligning their specific product roadmaps to the enterprise and product portfolio strategy. You will drive the innovation of product management to elevate our customer and associate experiences. You will do this by providing leadership oversight for the consistent governance and management of the product lines, including Product's strategic evolution to proactively maintain the bank's competitiveness in the marketplace. You will help lead the build and execution of additional product management capabilities across the product lines, and use scaled agile frameworks. This role will actively collaborate with Executive Leadership to develop a clear product management strategy and related capabilities to achieve and support the bank's strategic priorities. This role will actively collaborate with Technology & Data Innovation functions to ensure the customer and associate experiences are understood to enable the best strategic and sustainable solutions to be built. The Head of Product Management is accountable for product management's functional delivery, optimization, and strategic direction. Ensures the Product Management functions remain in alignment with CoBank's strategic direction. Oversees and delivers process standardization, documentation, optimization, automation, training, knowledge sharing, and scalability in alignment with the bank's strategies to: meet customers' needs; facilitate frictionless interactions; help support and grow customer relationships; improve the customer and associate experience and self-service capabilities; enhance productivity; and quickly identify and respond to future opportunities.
1. Product Strategy: Leads the enterprise's product strategy in alignment with the bank's overall business strategy, including the development and execution of a comprehensive strategy and target state that aligns the organization's product management / platform capabilities.
2. Product Development and Governance: Oversees the end-to-end product development, from ideation to launch. Lead cross-functional teams of Product Managers, Product Owners, and E2E Experience Managers. Partners closely with architecture, engineering and data leadership to deliver exceptional digital products.
3. Product Portfolio Management: Manages the entire enterprise product portfolio, making strategic decisions regarding resource allocation, prioritization, and sunsetting of underperforming products.
4. Product Objectives: Drives product objectives which articulates business outcomes, success metrics, design thinking, customer feedback and competitive analysis. Leads collaboration across CoBank to evaluate, educate and promote the expectations, success criteria and key performance indicators (KPIs) across the Product Management capabilities.
5. Product Roadmap: Leads and ensures the creation of strategic product roadmaps for each product line that outlines the product development lifecycle, milestones, timelines and is inclusive of E2E processes, data, supporting technology/architecture and controls required to ensure dependability, scalability and defensibility.
6. Digital First: Helps lead the delivery of the bank's Digital First strategy, leveraging the strategic product/platform capabilities to demonstrate execution against the Digital First Blueprint and key strategic priorities. Manages planning and delivery of key themes, translating objectives through distribution of best-in-class experiences and tech capabilities.
7. User Experience: Ensures products are designed and developed with a deep understanding of customer and associate needs, gathers and acts on customer and associate feedback. Collaborates with Executive Leadership to communicate desired future state across CoBank departments, functional and sub-process groups.
8. Metrics and Analytics: Leads Product Managers to define, track and manage the expectations and success criteria for the product lines, through analyzing product performance using metrics such as customer experience/user engagement, conversion rates, data structure, quality and usage; organizational capabilities and skills; technology enablement; revenue to identify optimization opportunities.
9. Stakeholder Management: Manage stakeholder expectations and communication to ensure that the digital products meet business objectives and user needs.
10. Budget Management: Partners closely with Portfolio Manager to ensure the product development budget is right sized and that resources are allocated effectively and efficiently. Collaborate with TDI, operations, security and business partners to coordinate and manage activities maximizing impact and overall return on investment.
11. Risk Management: Identifies and manages potential risks that may impact the success of the product lines. Identifies and pro-actively manages challenges impacting the products effectiveness and optimization, including any associated risks and issues relating to: engagement/adoption; behaviors; knowledge and skills; competing organizational priorities; customer needs and requirements; training, knowledge sharing, and operational issues; and change and process improvement challenges.
12. Work Prioritization: Drive consistent oversight for the evaluation, prioritization and authorization of any requested changes and/or enhancements to a product and its associated processes. Leads Product Managers to identify, define, initiate and implement organizational transitions and process improvement opportunities to realize the full capability and strategic objectives of the product.
13. Reporting: Oversees the portfolio of products' dashboards and reports, ensuring the availability and use of critical management tools for effective oversight. Provides on-going executive summaries to consistently communicate out to Executive Stakeholders the product management strategies, expectations, and achievements.
14. Manages staff. Sets performance standards, manages workflow, grants authorities, evaluates performance, provides coaching/mentoring, and recommends personnel actions within delegated authorities. Consults with Human Resources as appropriate.
15. Market Analysis: Responsible for continuously monitoring market trends, competitive landscapes, and emerging technologies to inform product decisions and stay ahead of the competition. Bridge broader market analysis to farm credit's niche customer landscape in order to maintain competitiveness. Ensures product compliance with bank policies and regulatory standards. Maintains expertise regarding competition, best practices and benchmarks.
Bachelor's Degree required 10 years relevant experience in financial institutions, including five (5) years of product management, strategy or consulting experience, and four (4) years in the financial services industry required
Proven experience in senior leadership roles within product management. Experience with product management methodologies, tools, and best practices.
Ability to manage and prioritize a large portfolio of products and initiatives. Experience with transformation programs and organizing large efforts into achievable deliverables.
Deep knowledge of the industry, market trends, and customer preferences.
Exceptional strategic thinking, vision, and problem-solving skills.
Ability to solve complex problems and develop solutions and communicate across all levels of the organization effectively.
Track record of successfully bringing innovative products to market and achieving revenue growth.
Results-driven and metrics-oriented approach.
Demonstrated team-building skills, with the ability to effectively facilitate and positively motivate across functional groups and sub-process teams. Fosters and encourages frequent, open and honest feedback.
Excellent interpersonal and leadership skills, with the ability to build and maintain effective working relationships and work collaboratively with all levels of executives, management, internal team members, customers and other stakeholders and partners.
Proven ability to exercise influence, gain and retain confidence, and drive engagement from bank management and leadership.
Ability to work and lead independently with minimal guidance, establishing strategic objectives, roadmaps and milestone goals.
Demonstrated critical thinking, problem solving and conflict management skills.
Exceptional verbal and written communication and presentation skills, with demonstrated ability to clearly articulate messages to a variety of audiences. Excellent active listening skills.
Excellent organizational and time management skills, with the ability to deliver commitments while juggling multiple projects and priorities. Ability to work effectively under deadline pressures and adjust quickly and effectively to changing priorities.
Knowledge with Microsoft Office applications (Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and Excel) and Azure DevOps, ServiceNow.
Master's degree or MBA preferred.
Sedentary Exerting up to 10 pounds of force occasionally (Occasionally: activity or condition exists up to 1/3 of the time) and/or a negligible amount of force frequently (Frequently: activity or condition exists from 1/3 to 2/3 of the time) to lift, carry, push, pull, or otherwise move objects, including the human body. Sedentary work involves sitting most of the time, but may involve walking or standing for brief periods of time. Jobs are sedentary if walking and standing are required only occasionally and all other sedentary criteria are met.
Occasional Travel occurs infrequently (typically, once a month or less).
The typical base pay range for this role is between $205,049 - $285,121. Compensation may vary based on individual job-related knowledge, skills, expertise, and experience. This position is eligible for a discretionary annual incentive program driven by organization and individual performance.
The listed salary, other compensation and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. CoBank reserves the right to adjust compensation for all positions and to modify or discontinue benefits programs at any time in its sole discretion, subject to applicable law.
CoBank is a cooperative bank serving vital industries across rural America. The bank provides loans, leases, export financing and other financial services to agribusinesses and rural power, water and communications providers in all 50 states. The bank also provides wholesale loans and other financial services to affiliated Farm Credit associations serving more than 76,000 farmers, ranchers and other rural borrowers in 23 states around the country. CoBank is a member of the Farm Credit System, a nationwide network of banks and retail lending associations chartered to support the borrowing needs of U.S. agriculture, rural infrastructure and rural communities. Headquartered outside Denver, Colorado, CoBank serves customers from regional banking centers across the U.S. and also maintains an international representative office in Singapore.
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