About Nava
Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple and effective. Since 2013, federal, state, and local agencies have trusted Nava to help solve highly scrutinized technology modernization challenges.
As a client services company, we guide agencies constrained by legacy systems to a future with sharp user experiences built on secure, reliable, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure. We bill for our time, offering our expertise and problem-solving approach to help our government partners enhance their digital products and services.
People are at the heart of our work, from members of the public who rely on benefit programs to government agency staff. Through human-centered design and modern engineering best practices, we help our government partners better understand user needs and deliver on their missions more effectively. This focus gives everyone at Nava the opportunity to do work that is meaningful, impactful, and deeply connected to public good.
Position Summary
We believe that structural change requires working at all levels, not only by improving service experiences and program outcomes but by fostering agency adaptability. By building modern cloud-based platforms and infrastructure, we help government agencies migrate off legacy systems so that they are better able to adapt to changing needs over time. We’re looking for a Technical Product Manager to help our government clients undergo a digital transformation so that they can be more responsive and adaptive to changing priorities and user needs.
As a product manager for platforms and infrastructure, you’ll be responsible for the foundational components that other government teams use to build digital products and services. You’ll focus on both the developers using your product and on the end users they serve. Combining your technical fluency and product management skills, you’ll help government clients deliver on their goals of modernizing legacy systems and migrating critical functions and data to the cloud. You will be uniquely positioned and empowered to make a huge impact on Nava’s mission to reimagine how our government serves its people.
What you’ll do
- Define the vision, strategy, roadmap, and measures of success for platform and infrastructure products, including data infrastructure, data pipelines, and API ecosystems
- Influence our government clients and shape their overall strategy to modernize mainframe systems and unlock the value of cloud infrastructure and API-first approaches
- Work with designers, product managers, project managers, and technical leads to discover and synthesize market research, user needs, business requirements, and technical approaches
- Engage with developer teams to understand user needs and pain points; work closely with designers and engineers on your team to iterate and improve upon the developer experience
- Define the direction, scope, and priority of projects, from high-level initiatives to specific features, user stories, and business metrics
- Work with technical leads to ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of technical products, platforms, and patterns
- Work with cross-disciplinary teams to build solutions that are optimized for security and privacy
- Design systematic and scalable approaches that enable customers to migrate to the cloud and modernize
- Based on customer and stakeholder needs, develop, roll out, and support modern DevSecOps methods, tools, and capabilities for developers and end-users
- Identify, prioritize, and deliver new product assets, working backward from customer needs. Product assets may include but are not limited to: market messaging, customer engagement tools, reference architectures and implementations, maturity models, a product knowledge base, service-integration solutions, and new platform services
- Understand, research, and follow technical trends in the industry and in general. Assess emerging products and companies to measure their potential value or threat to the cloud development platform we are building, and make recommendations on which new technologies to invest in or leverage
- Proactively socialize, iterate on, and build buy-in for product initiatives with the team, government partners, and other contractors
- Represent Nava’s outcome-centric and user-centric approach in discovery meetings with agencies and contractors
- Measure progress toward business goals or user needs and translate data insights into action
- Review technical specifications, architecture, and networking plans, and act as the Product SME in security, scalability, and infrastructure design discussions
- Ensure requirements and user stories are fully understood and that implementation plans match expectations
- Serve as a product spokesperson and subject matter expert to the technical/developer community
Required skills
- At least 3 years of experience developing products that are designed for a technical customer and have scaled to solve enterprise-level problems, such as cloud developer platform products or API products
- Experience and knowledge of cloud technologies (AWS highly desirable)
- Comfortable articulating the big picture and mapping and communicating the technical details of a system to stakeholders, customers, and partners
- Ability to generate very strong product plans and build buy-in across more than one team, including government partners and other contractors
- Ability to influence decision-making at all levels within an organization, using a variety of skills and tools
- Strong bias towards action; ability to step up into team gaps and ambiguous situations to structure the team’s action plan
- Ability to execute with incomplete information; great product instincts and an ability to create order from divergent needs
- Ability to identify market trends and shifts that will affect product direction, and update plans based on future expectations
- Ability to generate very strong product plans and build buy-in across more than one team, including government partners and other contractors
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills for technical, user experience, and project management trade-offs; enthusiastic and structured communicator
- An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative, and positive mindset