Product Manager

[Texas_Community_Watershed_Part]

Product Manager

Houston (Clear Lake), TX • Full-time • Product Team

Position will be open until filled. Interviews will be scheduled on a rolling basis.

9 years of progressively responsible project and product experience.

Key words: urban planning, scenario planning, geospatial tools, mapping applications, natural hazards, flood mitigation, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), engagement, resilience, SaaS (software as a service), collaborative, data visualization.

Job Location: Houston-Clear Lake, TX. Optional full-time remote but must reside in Texas.

Salary range: $110k-$130K.

TO APPLY

Please send a resume or CV, a cover letter, and a three-page writing sample to crystal.lugo@ag.tamu.edu to apply. 

Position Description – Product Manager

Are you driven to develop mapping and urban planning products with a tangible impact on community life and well-being? Motivated to increase tools and support for communities and decision makers across the nation? Excited about engaging users, government, and industry to enhance an existing product?

For more than a decade, the TCWP (Texas Community Watershed Partners) team has provided in-person mapping workshops using scenario planning and mapping technologies to provide an interactive, collaborative experience. These are designed for community staff, elected officials, and decision makers to engage in data driven, ‘what-if’ analysis of future land development scenarios. TCWP provides urban planning, hazard mitigation, and disaster recovery planning, consulting, and education for communities across the State of Texas and beyond. Our work focuses on practices that foster stakeholder-led, collaborative, and holistic solutions to reduce risks from flood and other hazards.

As a Product Manager with the Texas Community Watershed Partners Program (TCWP) you will help deliver and shape the next generation of community planning and mapping applications. You will collaborate closely with a cross-functional team conducting experiments to build consumer software that raises people’s voices and gives them more influence about the communities they live in. As a founding member of the Product Team, you will have the opportunity to guide our product, culture, and overall business of our team.

YOUR ROLE

The Product Manager will be tasked with overseeing two primary applications- the evolution of a legacy full-stack commercial quality GIS desktop software and the launch of a comparable web application to expand planning resources for communities across the nation. Your position will support the identification, prioritization, scheduling, monitoring, and testing the features and releases for these next generation planning applications. These will be developed with in-house and contract support.

You will assist in organizing, scheduling, and managing feature and tool development using agile and scrum project management approaches. In early development stages, this role will encompass program and project management, planning, establishing a team framework, and contract support for developer services. Product specific responsibilities will include gathering and centralizing requirements, document available data, identify use cases, classify user stories, define various workflows, and storyboard a variety of incremental releases for the desktop and web application.

As you are on-boarding, the legacy programming team will provide consulting support to assist your examination and orientation to the legacy software. The web application will utilize an innovative open framework modeling approach, providing data visualization, scenario wizards, comprehensive plan development, and project fund matching.

This will be an exciting opportunity to establish a state-of-the-art planning platform serving both technical and non-technical users. We look forward to partnering your passion for technology and solving users’ problems to motivate our team outcomes.

YOUR SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

We are looking for a tenacious problem solver who loves a challenge and is excited by the pace of startup located within a university setting. Candidate should be highly motivated, detail oriented, extremely organized, solutions-oriented candidate, with strong spatial, conceptual, analytical, and reasoning abilities, with excellent written and oral communication skills. Candidates should be adaptable to the growth of the team and work well in virtual teams.

Responsibilities

• Oversee development and maintenance of existing and new GIS applications that support community and urban planning efforts.
• Work with Program Manager and Program Director to strategize development of desktop and web application(s), identify product innovation opportunities.
• Shape the technical stack to provide product optionality and deliver better customer experience.
• Prepare and manage product objectives, product requirements and product roadmaps.
• Plan the product lifecycle, including planning, architecture, design, testing, documentation, and release.
• Support design and creation of elegant and scalable software.
• Assists in identifying funding opportunities.
• Prepares reports on product development activities.
• Assist in scope, schedule, and budget management across the portfolio of product development.
• Perform market research and environmental scan, and emerging technologies for additional advancement and evolution of the software and application platform.
• As a member of the product team, we collaboratively develop overall product vision, strategy, incremental release approach, and product roadmaps.
• Support partnership discussions with academic, research, State and Federal resources, allowing additional expansion of the platforms in development.

Key Competencies

• Product Management
• Market Research
• Project Management

Qualifications

Prior commercial development experience is highly desired. Additional criteria include:

• BS in computer science, engineering, geography, GIS, or related field
• 9+ years product development, including 4+ years in product management, oversight of development teams. Current software developed with C# or VB .NET, and/or JavaScript.
• Experience with product management and agile/scrum methodologies.
• Effective communication skills. Coordination of virtual teams a plus.
• Experience developing commercial-quality software and/or web applications.
• Strong knowledge of object-oriented design principles.
• Attention to detail and knowledge of software development best practices.
• Solid time management skills.
• Turn complex problems into actionable plans.
• Ability to remain open to ideas and constructive criticism.
• Evidence-based decision-making theory and understanding.

Please include an understanding of your role in project/product development and include samples of products and projects you have worked on in the past, if applicable.

Additional Desired Skills

• Core areas of expertise in one or more of the listed fields: Digital Transformation, SaaS, Low-Code/No-Code solutions, Emerging Technologies, Data analytics and Visualization, Information Assurance, Cloud Solutions, and Business Process Re-Engineering.
• Knowledge of WPF/MVVM design patterns.
• Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing methodologies.
• Artificial intelligence and ChatGPT API(s).
• Acute perception for streamlined UI (User Interface) and UX solutions.
• Experience with urban and regional planning.
• Experience working in GIS industry, working on mapping products, handling geospatial data, and using data visualizations to communicate ideas.
• Familiarity with geoprocessing tools and Python scripting.
• Understanding of Adult Learning Principles.
• Empathy for user/stakeholder needs.

OUR PRODUCT TEAM

The newly formed product team will update and refine scenario planning technologies to support community and user-led workflows for planning, mitigation, project identification and impact assessments for both desktop and online applications. The product team members will collaborate to generate product development strategies, engage a broad array of stakeholders and users, develop requirements, identify features, participate in development of prototypes, and incremental revision releases.

The product team is still forming, and multiple roles will be filled to support the expansion of our capabilities and team. These roles include program director, program manager, software/application developer, data engineer, business analyst, communications specialist, and operations support staff. A mix of in-house and contracted development work is envisioned to meet our team objectives.

PROGRAM BACKGROUND

Texas Community Watershed Partners (TCWP) provides urban planning, hazard mitigation and disaster recovery planning, consulting, and education for communities across the state of Texas and beyond. Our approaches focus on practices that foster collaboration and holistic solutions to reduce risks from flood and other hazards.

We engage the resources of Texas A&M University, AgriLife Extension Services, the Disaster Assessment & Recovery, other academic teams, State, and Federal agencies to aid and support community planning and preparedness – assessing impacts of development, identifying mitigation, and climate adaptation strategies.