Principal Product Manager

The Principal Product Manager is an experienced, autonomous individual contributor with a proven record of driving significant business impact across the product lifecycle. They mentor or manage up to one junior product manager, serve as the face of their product to senior leaders, and drive high-impact outcomes in complex business domains. They align with company strategy to identify and execute innovative solutions, build business cases to guide investments, develop junior talent, and ensure cross-functional alignment on priorities and impact.

Mission For This Role

The Principal Product Manager for Finance & Premium Audit will own a critical segment of Pie’s product lifecycle, reinforcing our brand promise of being  “easy as pie” to do business with.

Finance Journey 

As a financial services company, finances are the lifeblood of our business.  Our core product involves the collection of funds for protection against risk, and the payment of funds when risk is realized. We accomplish this through a network of agency partners across multiple distribution channels who play a key role connecting Pie with its customers, and supporting them across the insurance lifecycle.

As the product manager for the platform that powers our financial workflows, you'll improve customer and agent satisfaction while increasing operational efficiency. For example, by empowering customers with flexible payment options, or ensuring more timely and accurate distribution of commissions to agency partners.

Premium Audit Journey

Workers’ compensation premiums are initially based on estimated payrolls, which are adjusted post-audit to reflect actual figures. This process often involves additional payments from insureds and requires effective coordination with insurance agents, who serve as intermediaries.

Your mission will be to simplify and enhance the audit experience for small business owners, minimizing the burden of unexpected costs and administrative tasks. This effort will differentiate Pie’s service from industry norms and increase satisfaction among insureds and agents, while simultaneously preserving value for Pie.

Organizational & Thought Leadership 

Across these domains, the successful candidate must define a novel operating model for how product management will interact with the third party business systems, and the internal system administrators and integration engineers that manage them. This is a non-traditional team configuration, but one which is important for Pie’s success given substantial portions of our business operations, and insured/Agent/Pie-oneer experiences, are influenced by our third party business systems. 

Key Outcomes For First 12 Months

• Ensure successful roll-out of Pie’s new billing platform to support key non-premium revenue initiatives and scale billing for our newest line of business (Commercial Auto).
• Ensure successful roll-out of the new premium audit platform and related milestones for premium audit throughput, turnaround time, customer satisfaction, premium collection, etc.
• Develop a view of the largest potential opportunities across your product domain over the next 12 months, identify which opportunities are most important and why, and develop a set of target impacts to be achieved over the next 6-12 months.
• Fully integrate their domains into Pie’s Product Operating Model, incorporating Product management into business systems (e.g., sprint ceremonies, backlog grooming, etc) making adaptations as appropriate for the nuances of a third-party based product platform.
• Build high-trust, high-candor relationships with technology peers, as well as a Director+ level commercial partners invested in their domain.

How You’ll Do It

• Critical Thinking & Problem Solving:
• Develop novel frameworks for identifying and validating which problems are big enough to matter, and how we should go about solving them.
• Consistently distill complex product challenges into compelling recommendations built on a foundation of facts, assumptions, and logic.
• Define and utilize continuous systems for quantitative and qualitative feedback gathering, and regularly gets close to inspect user behavior and/or problems themselves.
• Prioritize your product roadmap towards the highest-ROI business and end-user goals, and consistently delivers quantifiable impacts that are within projected value estimates.
• Driving Execution and Impact:
• Apply understanding of technical fundamentals across multiple product and/or business domains to anticipate ways to mitigate risk and maximize value.
• Proactively recognize when processes or goals are misaligned with the highest value outcomes, and takes corrective actions autonomously.
• Optimize speed-to-value by making complex product decisions with minimal oversight, acting as the primary product leader accountable for decision-making, quality-control, and results delivery for your product area.
• Drive iterative improvement at all levels of the agile software development lifecycle, including sprint ceremonies, story writing, backlog prioritization, roll-out and launch, continuous monitoring, and program management.
• People Management:
• Participates in evaluating Product,  Engineering, and Design talent as part of hiring panels.
• Regular meetings with up to one direct report, providing coaching, feedback, and guidance (1x1s, development meetings, problem-solving sessions, formal performance summaries).
• Influencing and Communication:
• Builds high-trust relationships with senior leaders across the business and serves as a trusted advisor and thought partner.
• Creates alignment around shared objectives and facilitates adoption of enabling work among other teams; monitors progress and proactively addresses misalignment.
• Evangelizes a compelling vision for their product domain to educate and inspire buy-in across the organization.
• Distills complex information across multiple domains into a synthesized, well-supported structure that informs and makes the case for action.
• Facilitates or leads large cross-functional meetings with senior stakeholders up to Director-level with minimal guidance.

The Right Stuff

• 10+ years overall professional experience working on complex business and/or technology problems.
• 7+ years Product Management experience working in an agile software development lifecycle (SDLC) environment.
• Advanced communication (written, verbal and presentation) skills, to deliver complex information effectively and align people with the needs of the project/team.
• Advanced problem solving skills, able to manage complex situations with multiple layers, and resolve to solution anticipating needs now and into the future.
• Advanced understanding of continuous product discovery methodologies, including interviews, ethnographic research, job shadowing, passive feedback collection (e.g., surveys, product usage analytics), prototyping, etc.
• Advanced awareness of workflow, and project tradeoffs to make decisions based on needs now and into the future.
• Demonstrated ability to influence strategic direction across a broad coalition of peers, stakeholders, and senior leaders.
• Advanced understanding of modern software development tools, processes, and architecture patterns; knows how to strike a balance between business needs and the scope of software engineering solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple project deliverables, making decisions and understanding tradeoffs, and create processes for efficiency and effective product delivery for their team and broader cross-functional delivery coalitions.
• Marketing Analysis skills and a mastery of the Industry and sharing white paper level information as necessary.
• Mastery of quantitative analysis across all areas of the business.
• High level skillset in program management tools and project mapping.
• High level technical skills and mastery of the industry to mitigate complicated issues and manage multiple complex deliverables simultaneously.
• G-Suite Tools, Collaboration tools (Slack is preferred), Atlassian SDLC suite (Jira, Confluence, etc.).
• Proficient with Looker or other relevant analytics tools.