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The Innovation Office -Product Manager is part of the Innovation Office within the Business Technology organization and reports to the Head of Innovation, and works closely with the Innovation Office team. This role supports the Innovation Office’s initiatives and industry assessments, experimentation (including trial and production environments) along with competitive and industry analysis. The role requires understanding of Discover business needs and the strategic direction of the Business Technology organization, the Innovation office, and the marketplace. The Innovation Office Product Manager will build and maintain effective collaboration across the internal- and external-innovation ecosystem and provide oversight and support for internal and external Innovation Office resources.

We are looking for an experienced individual who is passionate about unlocking the value proposition of emerging technology such as blockchain, IoT, AR/VR, enhanced authentication, and AI to support all the verticals in our business at Discover (Card/Network/Bank/Analytics). You must enjoy working with a team in an intrapreneurial environment, influencing long-term direction of our solutions while working with a similar minded group of people.

The Product Manager will have responsibility for the growth and performance of Innovation Office experiments and be willing to work across multiple areas of technology as needed. This includes the development of strategies, heavily leveraging the core internal services and philosophies of Discover that drive product development, marketing, recruiting, and execution.

Responsibilities:

• Define and collaborate on roadmap/vision for the emerging technical areas of focus for the Innovation Office
• Work with internal stakeholders from various business units to understand business problems and identify product use cases that align with their goals and objectives
• Identify, manage and work closely with external vendors to help deliver products, strategies and prototypes
• Inform and influence general product strategies through coordinated events to showcase work, network relationships and promotion of use cases within Discover; including budget management and compliance responsibility
• Identify and cultivate key strategic partnerships and relationships internal and external to Discover to help advance the Innovation Office roadmap
• Organize and participate in demonstrations of experiments, symposiums, and meeting coordination
• Monitor intranet social groups for relevant innovation office topics and maintain/support team communications within these areas
• Organize and participate in functions with other departments, townhalls, lunch and learns
• Assist in creation of team videos/recorded demos and presentations as well as subsequent posting to our intranet channels
• Develops and communicates the product vision and roadmap. Adjusts and responds to changing market, customer and/or organizational needs, working closely with business teams and initiative owners.
• Supports the whole program and teams through the clarification of business needs, direction, and features.
• Helps break down initiatives into prioritized features with Acceptance Criteria, and manages the program pipeline (backlog) of these features, for every release and iteration.
• Provides issue management, risk assessments, risk mitigation, cost analysis, and minimum viable product evaluations.
• Responsible for developing, maintaining, and presenting the vision and roadmap for the value stream products or services.
• Creates the vision based on a thorough understanding of customer needs, working with both business initiative owners and technology teams.
• Guides both requirements and the work through the portfolio grooming, program grooming, and prioritization meetings by taking responsibility for “content decisions” and what gets implemented. Empowered to make fast decisions about the initiatives, with input from VPs and Initiative Owners, and other key stakeholders.
• Ensures the Product Owners are synthesizing business objectives and Agile development principles in order to develop features for key initiatives.

• The internal Innovation team includes:
  • Business and Business Technology stakeholders, through the Innovation Council and through a broader network of business and BT colleagues
  • Innovation Team members

The external parties will (possibly) include:

• External consulting resources (market data, industry information, etc)
• Startups/entrepreneurs
• Universities
• Public institutions
• Research & development institutes
• Peer companies
• Customers

Minimum Qualifications

At a minimum, here’s what we need from you:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering, Information Technology, Business, Marketing, Finance, or related field
• 4+ years of experience in Financial Services, Technology, Customer Service, Marketing, Operations, Project Management, Scaled Agile or Agile Development Project Management, Product Owner, Technology Architect, Software Development, or related field
• In lieu of a degree, 6+ years of experience in Project Management, Scaled Agile or Agile Development Project Management, Technology Architect, Software Development, or related field

Preferred Qualifications

If we had our say, we’d also look for:

• 4+ years of work experience. Technology or Financial Services industry experience preferred.
• Demonstrated passion and deep interest in technology and trends, follows latest trends in emerging tech for hardware and software
• Previous experience leading/driving technology projects as well as some previous integration/programming experience
• Intrapreneurship and/or entrepreneurship experience; comfortable with corporate ‘start up’ culture
• Proficient in MS Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), general office products and bonus points for the following: Proficient in robust application architecture, Familiar with cloud-based IaaS and PaaS solutions (AWS, Google Cloud, Cloud Foundry), Comfortable with modern file sharing and remote team working solutions; including remote demos of devices
• 6+ years of experience in Project Management, Scaled Agile or Agile Development Project Management, Product Owner, Technology Architect, Software Development, or related fiel
• Exceptional analytical, interpersonal skills, with clear and confident verbal and written communication skills
• Excellent presentation skills, capable of effectively presenting to all levels in the organization on trends and proof of concepts/prototypes
• Highly organized, capable of effectively managing competing priorities, and delivering results.
• Self-sufficient, highly motivated and extremely focused to work in an unstructured intrapreneurial team environment
• SaFe

Discover Financial Services is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, among other things, or as a qualified individual with a disability.