We are seeking a Director, Product to oversee the development and management of digital products for SCPR, KPCC and LAist.com, including web sites, mobile apps and other platforms. The role will lead day to day product development for SCPR. This includes engaging our audiences, surfacing and developing requirements from all internal stakeholders, facilitating development sprint planning, designing and implementing streamlined processes and automations, acting as POC with third-party vendors, and helping to grow the digital product team. 

Ideal candidates will bring skills including being a user experience expert, have editorial savvy, able to demonstrate success in scaling revenue and conversion, have an intense passion for tech, news, and the future of public media.

Position Responsibilities:

• Collaboratively define product vision for SCPR in partnership with the digital team, senior stakeholders, and other departments
• Combines the organizational skills of project management with a product manager’s talent for understanding how people engage with content in various contexts
• Understands the power of good process and able to build communication structure and strong cross-functional creative collaboration. Great at seeing both the big picture and at building the process to achieving it
• Wants to discover, verify, and meet the real news/information/entertainment needs of new and emerging news audiences and adjacent markets
• Thrives in an environment of constant feedback, from users, the newsroom, leadership, designers, and developers
• Maintain high-level product roadmaps for key digital products
• Manage requirements gathering and prioritization around various products
• Collaborate with software engineering and audience data and analytics to maximize resources and produce measurable results
• Foster a creative and productive work environment. Create development opportunities and individualized development plans for staff and training to enhance skills and foster growth
• Validate internal and external product releases

Essential Functions:

• Orchestrate product roadmaps that deliver meaningful, focused releases to customers while affording maximum flexibility for development teams and changing priorities.
• Promote features that demonstrate a great chance of success and discard bad, mediocre or merely good product ideas before they are built
• Build audience and revenue through successful product development and deployment
• Articulate features and requirements for the design and development team, and document those requirements for SCPR senior leadership
• Document goals and KPIs prior to all releases and launched initiatives
• Develop a deep knowledge of SCPR’s existing suite of products for the web and mobile devices, as well as the systems that support them
• Uncover customer needs and motivations that lead to innovative product ideas through a variety of audience research methods: in-person interviews, direct observation, remote usability testing, surveys and responding to customer support requests
  
  

Required Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent working experience
• Experience managing and working with engineering teams through agile software development and release processes (7 years)
• Experience working with engineering teams through agile software development and release processes
• Experience marketing and shipping B2C products to large audiences
• Deep understanding of the digital user experience, incl. user behavior and personalization
• Experience with web and application development, especially native mobile, agile/scrum methodologies, test driven development, mobile and web measurement processes and platforms
• Experience with wireframing, rapid prototyping and iterative design process
• Experience in online advertising and traffic-acquisition optimization (SEO)
• Experience working with large-scale, consumer-facing Web sites
• Experienced in the use of bug reporting and project management software (Asana, Jira, etc)

Required Skills, Knowledge and Abilities:

• Sharp assessment skills with an ability for ruthless prioritization and triage
• Strong ability to create clarity from ambiguity
• Comfortable with running lean
• Solid oral and written communication skills in an interdisciplinary team environment
• Excellent at distilling abstract content and product concepts for stakeholders
• Ability to balance small task management with creative big-picture product thinking
• Strong understanding of technical and system-related component of potential and existing products. Must be able to identify and define technical requirements
• Comfort with and bias towards frequent and deep user research, both qualitative and quantitative
• Ability to work independently with little supervision
• Leadership and personnel skills and ability to inspire and lead staff
• Solid oral and written communication skills
• Able to communicate and function effectively in a highly-distributed and remote work environment