Product Manager

Department: Product Development

Reports To: Senior Manager of Products

Location: Blacksburg, Virginia

Classification: Full-Time

As a Product Manager, you work in the fast-paced, Internet-driven industry with some of the smartest developers in the world. You eat, sleep, and dream about creating a better product for our customers. You personally have the opportunity to impact our customers' experience because, as our products proceed through different versions and development lifecycles, you anticipate where customers are going to encounter confusion and you eliminate it. We have demanding customers who expect our product to be user friendly and nothing less than perfect. It is because of this expectation and your love for our product that you work harder than you ever have before.

Your responsibilities to the customers (the people who pay us the big bucks) include:

• Being the user advocate when developers are designing and developing products
• Making sure that customer feedback is incorporated into the design of future product releases
• Developing user-friendly tools and proactively seeking out changes that need to be made
• Being a step ahead. You don't want our customers to be confused about a feature of our product so you anticipate where confusion might occur and you prevent it.
• Communicating expectations regarding product release dates to our customers.

Your responsibilities to your co-workers (the people pounding at your door) include:

• Working closely with development teams to design and deliver products.
• Developing realistic development plans and schedules and creating written product specifications and requirements.
• Evaluating and prioritizing requests for product changes, enhancements, etc.
• Determining objectives and test plans for any test involving clients.
• Resolving issues and problems that will affect product success.
• Developing strategic outlook in assigned technical area and keeping track of vendor roadmaps.
• Working to resolve issues with current products and interacting with customers and prospects to determine requirements and facilitate sales opportunities.
• Pushing the creative boundaries with the Graphic Designers to design and tweak products until they are perfect.

Important Skills and Characteristics:

• An understanding of email and web technologies as well as interface design and user friendliness.
• Being an analytical, detail-oriented, goal driven, aggressive professional.
• Excellent knowledge of all products within our product families, as well as company policies and practices.
• Experience with long-range and operational planning techniques.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills which enable you to operate as a matrix manager in coordinating people and technical resources from multiple areas of the company.
• Ability to operate efficiently under minimal supervision.
• A Bachelor's degree in business, sales, engineering, or marketing preferred.
• 4+ years of experience working in a technology, consulting environment, or in product development.

You're going to do just fine here if:

• You have an understanding of product management; you are technical; you can quickly educate yourself on our new products and services; you are organized; you can multi-task; and you know how to get your point across.
• You understand and apply the concepts of simplicity in design and can incorporate them into our product and website.
• You realize the importance of clean, simple, user interfaces.
• You have experience creating user documents for different types of software and are knowledgeable of user terminology as well as common usability issues or complaints.
• You can clearly articulate and communicate concepts to others, multitask, and organize and prioritize projects.

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