Senior Technical Product Manager/Product Owner

Do you want to work hard alongside smart and talented product managers, engineers, and designers every day? Do you excel when you are smack in the middle of a challenging project, thrive when things get complex, and yawn when you don’t have a hard problem to solve? Do you take pride in your ability to stay organized, and to help your team build great products? If yes, then join our team as we build awesome software for schools. Our team is the perfect blend of the stability of a larger company with the agility and speed of a startup. 

At Lightspeed Systems we are on a mission to help K12 schools provide safe, secure, and equitable education—effortlessly.

Our Senior Technical Product Manager/Product Owner will be responsible for driving products and features from inception through execution as the scrum Product Owner. You will use your deep product experience and your lean product and agile development toolkit to work with stakeholders to “build the thing right,” through the SDLC.  

Our products are deeply entwined with networking and deep operating system intricacies, and we need someone with a strong technical understanding to be able to understand not only what the end goal is but how to technically get there. You must possess a unique blend of business and technical sophistication; a big-picture vision, and the drive to make that vision a reality. You must enjoy spending time understanding the industry, the market, and empathizing with the customers and their problems, and then relish the ability to translate opportunities into working software.  

ABOUT THE ROLE 

• Be a scrum product owner rockstar 
• Keep bugs to a minimum and properly manage bug fixes when they crop up
• Be able to communicate work in progress effectively to all internal stakeholders (product, marketing, sales, support, leadership, development) to ensure clear alignment and prioritization
• Maintain a relevant and well prioritized backlog, supported by user storyboards, acceptance criteria and other artifacts needed by development teams. 
• Articulate communicator both verbally and in writing. 
• Outstanding organizational and analytical skills. 
• Manage the entire product life cycle from introduction to growth, to maturity, and back again
• Bring new products to market while balancing existing ones
• Set the strategy, vision, and roadmap for your products
• Practice lean product methodologies, working through experiments, interacting with customers, and focusing on achieving measurable goals
• Work closely with stakeholders (internally and externally) to first synthesize multiple points of view and then achieve buy-in for the direction your products are heading from all stakeholders.
• Be able to masterfully communicate to all internal stakeholders (product, marketing, sales, support, leadership, development) to ensure clear alignment and understanding
• Outstanding organizational and analytical skills, able to juggle multiple priorities simultaneously
• Have rock solid confidence and calmness to lead such a meaningful and high stakes products  

ABOUT YOU – KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & ABILITIES  

• Have a growth mindset and know what a growth mindset is.  
• Understand markets, competition, and user requirements deeply. 
• Are always flexible and adaptable as you go in and out of full autonomy and then into deep collaboration.  
• Relish the opportunity to be an integral part of a team, but also like to roll your sleeves up and do the daily work of building something great.  
• Can make quick work of requirements and can get everyone in alignment with meaningful meetings and simple written records.
• Is technologically savvy and can understand sophisticated networking concepts with ease.
• Ability to present complex technical information non-technical audiences in a way that they will understand. 
• Can manage and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously, from concepts to deliverables. 
• Always ready to roll up your sleeves and do work, never waiting for someone else to do the work, there is always more to be done. 
• Can conduct user story mapping sessions in your sleep. 
• Ability to think holistically, in a design thinking and lean fashion, with a sharp eye for detail and consistency.  
• Thoroughly believe that the devil is in the details and is confident they can get those details right.  
• Are technologically savvy and can understand sophisticated technical concepts with ease, such as APIs, Integrations, on device agents, networking.  
• Are obsessed with empathizing with and understanding the customer.  
• Can manage and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously, from concepts to deliverables.  
• Comfortable with feedback and adapts quickly to changing information.  
• Experience working in a deadline-driven atmosphere.  
• Have a proven track record of delivering quality products and features under all circumstances, whether you had 5 months, or 5 days to accomplish the goal.  
• Understand how to juggle multiple stakeholder perspectives and personalities with grace and skill .

NEED TO HAVE  

• 5+ years experience in a product role such as a Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, or Product Manager. 
• 2+ year deployed and/or SAAS software experience.

NICE TO HAVE 

• Education industry experience
• B2B Product experience 
• Scrum Certified Product Owner (Extra points for multiple/advanced certifications) 
• SAAS experience 
• Experience at a company in their growth phase

ABOUT US

For over 20 years, Lightspeed Systems® has been a leader in the ever-changing landscape of K-12 learning technology.  Lightspeed Systems works with tens of thousands of schools to maximize the safety, mobility, and effectiveness of their students’ learning experience.  Every device can be covered with the most effective web filter, student safety monitor, classroom management software, device management tool, and analytics program available.  Learn more at www.lightspeedsystems.com.

We love our employees, and we show it.  A sneak peek into our BENEFITS & PERKS include:

• Health -- Medical, dental and vision insurance with healthy company contribution toward premiums. Lightspeed kicks cash into your HSA if you participate our HDHP.
• Wellness -- Paid parental leave. Healthy holiday and PTO policy, including Christmas to New Year’s Day break.  
• Retirement -- 401(k) matching up to 6%
• Other -- Work from where it makes sense. Pet insurance.

ABOUT OUR ATX HQ

If “work from where it makes sense” includes being onsite for you some or all the time, you will LOVE being at the ranch. Our uniquely Lightspeed (and totally Texas) corporate headquarters has everything Lightspeeders need to get the job done – and a whole lot more.

• 15,000 sq. ft. of open work area, offices, and huddle rooms
• A private chef serving up lunch Tuesday through Thursday every week
• A state-of-the-art fitness center (with outfitted locker rooms)
• Indoor and outdoor casual collaboration spots
• Pet-friendly office environment
• A golf simulator, go-carts, shuffleboard, corn hole, and MORE fun

All within 31 sprawling acres of Live Oak trees that foster a natural habitat for local wildlife. It is not uncommon to be greeted daily by whitetail deer. (Maybe it wants to join your meeting?)