Product Manager, Advice Engines
Morningstar brings people together with a singular goal in mind—to build software that users love. From individual investors to portfolio managers—we live to create transparency, always focused on bringing clarity to complexity and creating tools that support millions of investors in ways that excite, inform and create long-term success. The Workplace group’s mission is to put employees on the path to financial freedom and security, driving better financial and retirement outcomes for employees and designing unique solutions that help solve our clients’ current and future problems.
As a Product Manager, you are responsible for making sure we build the right software products for our business and our users. You will define, deliver, and manage the entire lifecycle, from productizing research IP to ongoing client integration and service. While you understand guiding the product development is important, you are excited to “get your hands dirty” working with makers of different disciplines to further our mission of building software users love. Additionally, you will manage relationships with our clients that are using Morningstar’s proprietary research, investment methodology, and predictive analytics to guide their retirement plan participants to better investment outcomes. By combining your keen sense for supporting client needs with an understanding for how our platform works technically and the underlying calculations and business rules, you’ll make an impact by accelerating our clients’ business initiatives. This position is based in our Chicago office and reports to the Senior Manager of Advice Engines.
Responsibilities
- Translate business intent, customer needs, and/or technical direction into clear, concise, well-documented business requirements and/or product backlog for Advice Engines teams.
- Develop deep understanding of Morningstar’s Wealth Forecasting Engine including the underlying calculations, business rules, and technology in order to serve as a subject matter expert and provide context to ideas and decisions.
- Support product adoption through coordinating and/or supporting training sessions, data analysis, and action-oriented strategic planning activities.
- Empower internal stakeholders to succeed by confidently conveying client needs, asking clarifying questions, and setting/managing expectations.
- Build and maintain relationships, and act as the primary technical point of contact for a portfolio of Advice Engines clients.
- Collaborate with Project Managers, Quantitative Analysts, Researchers, and Product Teams to provide timely and accurate resolution of client requests, thoughtfully shielding or introducing them to the relationship at the most appropriate time.
- Lead internal teams to analyze client issue impact and risks (cost/benefit) to different teams, discover solution, and construct clear plan, responding to changes with resilience and flexibility.
- Drive the creation and maintenance of strong documentation for client integrations, FAQs, etc.
- Provide onboarding support, training, measurement, and quality control to junior team members to ensure consistent process compliance and remediation when necessary.
- Conduct periodic business reviews with account management to track progress against goals and ensure client satisfaction while leading them to becoming a reference.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree providing significant grounding in fundamental concepts of finance, economics, and business.
- 3+ years of relevant and progressive experience as a Product Manager or Business Analyst, working with software teams using Scrum methods.
- 3+ years of experience building custom software products in the financial sector (commercial or investment banking, capital markets, insurance, tax, etc.).
- 1+ year hands-on SQL experience and the ability to run ad-hoc data analysis.
- 1+ year experience communicating and working directly with external clients/customers, up to management level.
- 1+ year experience with Atlassian tools including Jira and Confluence.
- Experience bridging cross-functional conversations between research SMEs, quantitative analysts, external clients, and software development teams using knowledge of customer needs, business drivers, and financial and technology concepts.
- Understanding of contract/legal language and ability to interpret that language in practical business terms to find the right "win/win" solution and to ensure understanding of, and adherence to, terms and expectations.
- Ability to keep cool, think clearly, engage others, define next steps, and orchestrate activities with appropriate level of urgency.
- Superb professional and client communication skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Demonstrated aptitude for mathematical models and applying quantitative methods.
- Experience working with investment research teams.
- Experience within the automated advice space.
- Experience with leading edge technology including Big Data and Machine Learning.
- Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) or any of the Scaled Agile/SAFe certifications (SA, SP, PMPO, SPC, etc.).
Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.