Product Manager

Add Value, Join Valen.

Are you:

Entrepreneurial:

Market and results focused, taking initiative in an unstructured environment and influencing positive change
Team-oriented, collaboratively supporting and enabling the success of others

Direct:

An effective and direct communicator, challenging ideas while remaining open-minded and valuing diversity of thought
Willing to give and receive productive feedback

Able to Wow:

Creative and innovative, a true problem-solver, generating new and exciting ideas and high-value solutions
Focused on customer experience and exceeding client expectations, striving for flawless execution

Principled:

Honest, demonstrating integrity and trust, and assuming positive intent
Show others respect and striving to do the right thing

Fun:

Willing to be the real you, and have fun doing it
Ready to work hard and play hard

If so, Valen wants YOU. We need YOU to achieve our vision: Valen Technologies will revolutionize the Property and Casualty Insurance Industry, enabling step-function value-advances in insurance decisioning and operations. We will do this through the smart and expert integration of advanced predictive modeling and analytics into the insurance policy booking, underwriting, pricing, and claims operations processes. We are a venture capital backed, growth-stage company with a growing client base, including two of the top ten insurance carriers in the United States.

As a Product Manager at Valen, you will:

Drive product strategy:
- Team with Sales, Partnership Marketing and Business Development to assess the market for high-potential products and market positioning
- Facilitate and support the strategic product direction of Valen predictive analytic solutions for P&C insurance, and develop and maintain the Valen product roadmap; shape new product development, next generations of existing products, and partner with marketing and delivery to drive product launch strategy
- Interact closely with clients to identify true needs and points of value, synthesizing cross-client themes to shape highly scalable, configurable products avoiding undue customization
Design products:
- Craft Marketing Requirements Documents (MRDs)
- Generate product and functional requirement documents, as well as process flow and technical system integration requirements documents for engineering, data, and modeling teams to accomplish product design, build, testing, and deployment
- Create Use Cases, information flow and process diagrams, user interface mock-ups, and other tools to effectively communicate requirements for development, testing, and implementation teams.
Manage product development:
- Shape scope, priority, and sequence of product development activities among cross-functional teams, and manage requirement and scope conflicts among stakeholders, making trade-offs to deliver value while pacing work-efforts and enhancements over time
Project Management for Strategic Initiatives:
- Ownership for strategic initiatives related to product, product performance/scalability, and speed to market
- Formalize, own, publish, and track progress of project plans
- Facilitate resource planning and project sequencing in coordination with Client Delivery project managers
- Own periodic project meetings and updates to senior manager, highlighting issues/barriers to plan and facilitating solution-generation among team to optimize delivery
Support customers:
- Oversee user acceptance testing, and train customers on product usage
- Upon product deployment, field product usage questions and requests and solicit customer feedback; identify and log defects, and partner with engineering to plan and sequence fixes for subsequent build / release cycles, to drive high product quality, stability, and maturity over time.
- Develop and maintain effective communication with clients, including release planning and coordination, dissemination of notes and other pertinent information
Propel innovation:
- Continually assess product value and performance relative to competitive offerings, and solicit improvement features and benefits from product users and users of competitive products to ensure product pertinence in the marketplace and to continually drive marketplace differentiators.
Promote new business:
- Lead effort/requirements for developing product demos. Product demos will help clearly convey current state of product (is/is not) and help shape work content for work order formulation, align delivery expectations with contract content, and enable roadmap/customization planning (and charges for customization within the sales cycle).
- Partner with Marketing Communication to develop effective product demonstrations to potential customers, and provide content for marketing materials; participate in trade shows

Your Ideal Qualifications include:

Education:

BA/BS in Business, Finance, Risk Mgmt; MBA a plus
Software product management experience: 5+ years career experience in the activities listed above
Formal project manager experience: 2+ years managing medium to large projects across multiple functional groups/stakeholders
P&C Insurance underwriting and claims domain expertise

Major pluses:

Experience developing and deploying predict analytic and information solutions for P&C insurance clients
Formal P&C experience with underwriting policies, work-flow and process, management, and underwriting systems
Creativity, developing practical, implementable solutions for challenging business problems
Strategically minded, capably learning and identifying market and client product needs and synthesizing into scalable “one to many” product delivery solutions
Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, demonstrating the ability to present predictive analytic concepts to Executive Management to our clients
Contract development
Basic data and information analysis and programming skills

The opening is in Denver, Colorado, and will require occasional travel to clients, prospects, and partners.