The Group: Morningstar is committed to empowering investor success. One way we accomplish this is by offering independent data, research and great products to the financial community. We believe that when the investor wins, we all win. The Advisor Client Experience (ACE) group is the home of manufacturing and innovation at Morningstar. The individuals in this group transform our high-quality data, independent research, and technological expertise into well-designed software products. The group's product management, product development, customer success, and customer service teams, respectively, collaborate with our sales and client solutions group to help provide relevant products and solutions that assist in solving market problems and enable our Members to best serve investors.
The Role: The Advisor Client Experience (ACE) Products team seeks an enthusiastic, results-driven, technically minded Sr. Product Operations Manager to operationalize, streamline, and accelerate the delivery and support of our products and solutions.
This position will be first in a new Product Operations team within ACE. The role is a "Player-Coach", both managing a team (such as setting priorities and developing others) but with an attitude and aptitude for "digging in" as a member of the team. It is important to note that this role and the team will continue to adapt as the needs of the organization evolve and mature.
As a Sr. Product Operations Manager, you'll work directly with technology, product management, and external-facing teams (i.e., customer support, sales, customer success, client insights) while also fulfilling the operations needs of our existing solutions that serve more than 185,000 Members in North America alone. You will also develop intimate knowledge of our products and solutions; build strong partnerships with internal partner teams globally; define, build and improve processes and documentation; provide timely response to client requests; confirm adherence to company and security standards; and aid sales and marketing efforts.
This is a highly cross-functional management role and it will be a critical lever for us to deliver on our mission. You will hire and manage one (1) to two (2) Product Operations Analysts within the first six (6) months and over time you will build a larger team supporting our products globally. Impact will be measured by Member retention ("churn" reduction), Net Promoter Score (NPS), average solution delivery cycle time (i.e., from contract execution to revenue recognition), and internal stakeholder satisfaction (eNPS).
This role reports to the Director of Program Management. We prefer for this position to be located in our Chicago or Toronto office but will consider candidates working remotely in the United States or Canada where Morningstar is registered to conduct business. The ideal candidate will bring a high degree of self-motivated engagement and high connectivity/availability within our time zones, and we recommend periodic travel to Morningstar offices for remote team members.
Responsibilities (In Business Value Priority):

• Accountable for internal facing product operations tasks including product maintenance, product and methodology documentation, new releases, applying client configurations, applying technical and security updates, and incident management
• Collaborate with product managers to ensure customer-centric product development and support
• Develop forward thinking operational workflows that accommodate scale and rapid growth as new products and services are launched
• Establish processes, policies, and collaboration models to proactively detect and resolve release and maintenance issues
• Collaborate with Program Management, Implementation/Delivery, and Technology to design and run process automation and process improvement experiments; interpret the results to draw detailed and impactful conclusions that influence product development.
• Identify process and automation gaps, make recommendations, and manage significant process improvement initiatives from end-to-end.
• Establish and maintain regular communications with key team members across the Product, Member-facing and Tech orgs.
• Drive top company priority beta tests, launches, and global rollouts (in partnership with product marketing, Member operations, account management, product training, and others)
• Develop data-driven business insights and work with cross-functional partners to identify improvement opportunities and recommend prioritization of product, growth, and optimization initiatives.
• Work with cross-functional stakeholders to implement departmental workflows/ways of working to deliver new products and releases to existing products.
• Ensure the product development teams are creating and maintaining playbooks and guides/documentation, used to conduct new product training for stakeholders including coaches, event staff, sales, customer success, marketing, and customer experience.
• Surface and advocate for key insights from the business to advise product delivery improvements.
• Provide content for sales and marketing efforts (e.g., RFP, RFI, etc.); schedule and coordinate routine client compliance activities (e.g., security questionnaires, certificate/key rotations, light reporting, etc.)
• Monitor and own the case cycle turnaround metrics when Product is involved with resolving Member issues.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience working with software products and cross-functional teams.
• 3+ years of experience in a software product operations role, including but not limited to: operations manager, software product manager, technical program manager, technical account manager, release manager, implementation manager or similar role that worked closely with product, engineering, and client teams. ***Please Note: non-technical roles like business operations manager, relationship manager, contract manager, or requirements analyst are not a fit.
• Strong customer-service mindset and passion for delivering an outstanding Member experience; can develop a deep knowledge of a complex product and its use cases.
• Strong technical aptitude: willingness and ability to "dig in" to solve tough technical or process problems and self-motivated to quickly gain familiarity with new functional concepts, technology, or implementation details.
• Ability to project calm in difficult situations, guide the team through sound decision-making processes with appropriate sense of urgency and foster a healthy team environment.
• Strong quality focus: proactively identifies and resolves gaps, risks, and issues and creates a positive culture of continuous improvement.
• Demonstrated ability to design custom-fit solutions or processes and use persuasion and emotional intelligence to generate buy-in and implement across multiple internal teams without direct authority.
• Experience architecting, building, and maintaining a documentation library or contributing to a product knowledge base.
• Demonstrated experience with cloud architecture, incident management, release management, change management, root cause analysis (RCA), modern security technology and approaches, and DevOps principles and practices.
• Ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with distributed teams; can influence and coordinate the work of others across different cultures and timezones, as our teams are in eleven (11) countries.
• Understanding of business fundamentals including client contract terms, regulatory compliance, service level agreements, and revenue recognition.
• • A bachelor's degree is required. Knowledge of Agile methods and familiarity with software-as-a-service (SaaS) products are preferred.

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