Director of Product, Research and Development
JELLYVISION NEEDS A DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
We here at Jellyvision are the proud parents of ALEX®, an interactive employee communications platform that happens to share some DNA (and a sense of humor) with the smash-hit trivia video game YOU DON’T KNOW JACK®, created by Jellyvision's founder. ALEX makes navigating tricky decisions—like choosing and using employee benefits or improving your financial wellness—easier, faster, and more helpful, not to mention entertaining.
THAT’S LOVELY, BUT WHAT’S THE JOB?
Our Product leaders own the customer pain and are responsible for making sure our products solve that pain and meet Jellyvision’s P&L objectives in the process.
This leader would oversee key product owners who focus on new product concepts and R&D projects to identify new value propositions, defining go or no go decisions while developing go-to-market needs.
High level Responsibilities - Our Senior Product leader would:
- Identify, define & prioritize customer & user overlapping pain points using internal customer facing teams, our business analysts, and your own research to seek out new customer and user problems(aka, prove willingness to pay).
- Develop a mindset and team to be a market listener, a strategist who can dot connect between market trends, customer feedback, and business analysis.
- Develop clear ROI and P&L models for new products.
- Develop and drive the go-to-market strategy for their product to gain traction, learn and pivot if needed to get a customer to pay for a solution
- Manage the product’s lifecycle and how any new concept fits into the overall Jellyvision product suite & platform approach.
- Uphold Jellyvision’s expectations of creative excellence and helpfulness in our products and align their product with the total vision and strategy for all ALEX products.
Core Responsibilities - A successful Senior Product Leader would:
- Understand if the customer is willing to buy or pay for a solution.
- Ability to develop a discovery process and capable of creating prototype, test-able concepts and pilots to learn fast.
- Outline the customer side solution objectives and goals for the product, including the competitive set and differentiation possibilities.
- Clearly size market opportunities (with the help of our business analysts).
- Develop the business plan for the product, including market penetration expectations, pricing, channel distribution plans, payback period, etc.
- Develop messaging and value definition for go to market materials (with the help of marketing and sales leaders) and timelines, including marketing/PR plans, sales enablement, channel support needs, contracts, and additional customer success product riders.
- Define and track what performance your new product should expect and create reporting capabilities for key KPIs to stakeholders.
- Based on performance and market analysis, propose and drive key iterations, pivot or decision to end plans for the product.
SO WHAT KIND OF PERSON ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?
We’re looking for someone who lives and breathes customers, and someone who has experience with new product development. You might have had titles like product manager, product strategist, entrepreneur or maybe even product development. But who knows, maybe it was something else. You probably have experience strategy, product management, start-up experience, sales, or business analysis , and even an MBA.
Competencies for this Role:
Balances Stakeholders
- Collaborator. You’re a hyper collaborator, who knows how to work with many stakeholders and a variety of teams, and gain buy in from your constituents.
- Genuine. No one likes a phony. Jellyvision people really care, are really interested, and really want to help people.
- Understands internal and external stakeholder requirements, expectations, and needs.
- Balances the interests of multiple stakeholders.
- Acts fairly despite conflicting demands of stakeholders.
Cultivates Innovation
- Start-up Experience. Someone who has been part of or started a business and can show how they took an idea to market to grain traction.This is skill is critical.
- Introduces new ways of looking at problems and comes up with useful ideas that are new, better, or unique.
- Can take a creative idea and put it into practice.
- Encourages diverse thinking to promote and nurture innovation.
Strategic Mindset
- Strategic and yet tactical. This role requires a fair amount of bigger picture thinking, but you’ll also be in the weeds with things like prototyping, iterating, and creating value creation. You’ve got to be someone who can jump to the 30 ft level and back down again with ease.
- Anticipates future trends and implications accurately as well as readily poses future scenarios.
- Articulates credible pictures and visions of possibilities that will create sustainable value.
- Creates competitive and breakthrough strategies that show a clear connection between vision and action.
Action Oriented
- Driven. This role isn’t for the faint of heart. You should be someone excited by new adventures, finding traction on new products, excited by the chase, and very energetic.
- P&L. You are confident in making decisions and owning a product’s value creation and financials. A Senior Product leader is a bit of an entrepreneur, and you love the idea of being akin to a Mini “CEO” of new products.
- Readily takes action on challenges, without unnecessary planning.
- Identifies and seizes new opportunities, displays a can-do attitude in good and bad times.
Drives Vision & Purpose
- New Product Discovery. An individual who understand new product discovery process and thinking. This person understands problem definition, user interview methods, MVP, prototyping and user experience methods. This skill is critical.
- Talks about future possibilities in a positive way
- Creates milestones and symbols to rally support behind the vision
- Creates organization-wide energy and optimism for the future
Builds Effective teams
- Lead & Manage. You have to have managed teams directly as well as indirectly with strong influence skills to align teams to drive towards success.
- A networker who is willing to pick up a phone to discover opportunities through conversations with customers, partners, prospects, and resellers.
- Forms teams with appropriate and diverse mix of styles, perspectives and experiences.
- Established common objectives, a shared mindset and strong team morale.
Manages Ambiguity
- Curious. The best customer listeners are those who enjoy learning and can’t help but think about why something is the way it is.
- Deals comfortably with the uncertainty of change.
- Effectively handles risk, can decide and act without the total picture.
- Is calm and productive, even when things are up in the air.
- Deals constructively with problems that do not have clear solutions or outcomes.
ANYTHING ELSE? Our credo is a simple one: be helpful. And we think we can be most helpful if our workforce is as diverse in thought, perspective, and culture as the people who use our products. We are looking to add amazing folks to our team who will bring diversity across many lines, including race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity, sex, and country of origin.
Thanks for your interest in Jellyvision!