Product Manager (Multilingual Platform)
City of Boston, Department of Innovation and Technology · Boston, MA
Overview:
This is a grant-funded position, funded through the Multilingual Digital Experience Grant, and expected to last until December 2026
Millions of people interact digitally with the City of Boston each year, 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 enhance 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 Product Manager, you’ll lead cross-functional teams to deliver user-centered products using various product management methodologies and modern software development practices while building capacity for product innovation in government. You’ll be a champion for user needs and improve end-to-end user experiences through improvements in technology, business processes, and streamlined systems. You’ll work closely with City departments and must have strong communication and relationship management skills.
Product managers on our team are:
- Strategic thinkers who are comfortable defining a compelling vision and designing a measurable strategy and roadmap to achieve that vision, owning and stewarding the product vision, and leading end-to-end product development.
- Decisive leaders who know how to motivate cross-functional teams to build the right thing.
- Comfortable working running a product directly as well as working in a consulting capacity with City departments with varying degrees of digital experience.
- Excited to build institutional expertise around product management by sharing best practices and tools with your peers across the organization, contributing to our growing culture of product management.
Responsibilities:
- Understands our end users and continuously seeks to inform product direction and roadmap with user research, data, and feedback from end users.
- Ensures a consistent, dignified, and delightful end-to-end user experience across products and channels.
- Works closely with contributors from each department to understand their goals, define a strategy, and continuously improve the delivery of their services.
- Translates needs from users and departments into an overall product vision, strategy, and roadmap that is aligned with our Digital Services principles, building internal and external buy-in along the way.
- Collaborates with other teams to ensure compatibility with existing technologies, integration with a systems architecture approach, and adherence to security and other relevant standards.
- Analyzes market demand and market fit, does competitive analysis, and guides build vs. buy or reuse approaches for components and products that are part of the end-to-end service delivery.
- Leads a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, and engineers to deliver value to end users.
- Translates product strategy into detailed business and technical requirements, expressed and tracked as epics, user stories, acceptance criteria, etc.
- Works closely with design and engineering teams to develop flows, wireframes, mockups, prototypes, usability testing to deliver value quickly, then try, test, and iterate to deliver improvements.
- Refines, prioritizes, and slates work, ensuring all approved work is surfaced and visualized on the team’s board, all approved work includes acceptance criteria and relevant business and technical requirements, and closed tickets have been reviewed to verify the fulfillment of acceptance criteria.
- Defines and tracks key product metrics; uses metric targets to inform product evolution.
- Identifies and proactively monitors and addresses product and project risks.
- Acts as a product evangelist to build awareness and understanding.
- Represents the organization by meeting with customers to solicit feedback on products and services.
- Drives product launches, including working with communications, executives, and other product development team members.
- Works with the team to set and meet quality standards for any product you build.
- May supervise and coach other staff members.
- May oversee contracts and projects with contractors and vendors.
- Assists in procuring additional resources (e.g., software, professional services), as needed.
- Performs related work as required.
Minimum Entrance Qualifications:
- At least three (3) years of full-time, or equivalent part-time, professional experience as a Product Manager of a cross-functional team or related field.
- Experience running and/or configuring Call Center applications is a plus; previous experience with building or managing enterprise level products is preferred.
- Understanding of user-centered design methods and usability best practices.
- Demonstrated track record of execution and entrepreneurial thinking.
- Ability to generate very strong product plans and build buy-in across the team, our government partners, and other contractors.
- Strong organizational skills, ability to manage multiple projects and meet deadlines under pressure.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills for technical, user experience, and project management trade-offs; enthusiastic communicator.
- Strong bias towards action; ability to step up into team gaps and ambiguous situations to structure the team’s action plan.
- Ability to execute with incomplete information; great product instincts, and an ability to create order from divergent needs.
- Ability to define a product objective and logically reverse engineer the path and communications to achieve the objective.
- Ability to identify market trends and shifts that will affect product direction and update plans based on future expectations.
- An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative, and positive mindset.
- Preference given to candidates with knowledge of product management, project management software, Call Center technologies and best practices, examples: Cisco, Nextiva, and Five9.
- Ability to exercise good judgment and focus on detail as required by the job.
BOSTON RESIDENCY REQUIRED
You must live within Boston city limits at the start of your employment.
Terms:
Union/Salary Plan/Grade: SENA/ MM1-8
Hours per week: 35
