Lean-Agile/SAFe Product Manager

Our Firm

American Century Investments® is a leading global asset manager with over 65 years of experience helping a broad base of clients achieve their financial goals. Our expertise spans global equities and fixed income, multi-asset strategies, ETFs, and private investments.

Privately controlled and independent, we focus solely on investment management. But there’s an unexpected side to us, too. We direct over 40% of our profits every year—more than $2 billion since 2000—to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. Our ongoing financial support drives the Institute’s breakthrough work and mission of defeating life-threatening diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. So, the better we do for our clients, the more we can do for everyone.

All 1,400 of us across the globe are inspired every day by the unique difference our hard work can make in so many lives. It shows in the curiosity we bring to every initiative, the deep relationships we build with our clients, and the way we treat each other in the hallway. If you’re excited to learn more about us, we can’t wait to learn more about you.

Role Summary

The Lean-Agile SAFe Product Manager is a member of the Agile Release Train (ART) Product Management team acting as the voice of the internal customer and stakeholder. As a team member, you will represent a domain or business capabilities and collaborate to develop and communicate a program vision and strategy in alignment with the ART’s strategic themes and priorities. Other primary responsibilities include breaking epics into features and sequencing the work into releases to improve the value delivered by the ART. Ultimately you will be responsible for helping to deliver technology and business solutions.

This role will focus on supporting the Enterprise Data team with Investment / Client data products programs, Master data, and reference data product programs. This role will assist the data teams in developing, maintaining, and implementing strategic business roadmaps.

You will also manage a team of Product Owners and Business Analysts, providing leadership and guidance to ensure alignment with the ART's goals and objectives.

This hybrid position will be based out of our Kansas City, MO office.

Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor a team of Product Owners and Business Analysts, fostering a collaborative and high-performance work environment.
• Interact with executive partners, System Architects, business users, and Product Owners to identify, groom, and prioritize features and releases for the program backlog.
• Understand portfolio and Agile Release Train themes and assist in the decomposition of epics into features and releases to improve early value realization.
• Work collaboratively with all Product Managers within the ART to build a vision and strategy that balance business functionality and architectural considerations.
• You will collaborate to groom and prioritize the program backlog to ensure features are ready for Program Increment (PI) planning.
• Assist in communicating the vision and release objectives during PI planning.
• Validate features and releases to meet their pre-determined acceptance criteria.
• Coordinate dependencies with other Product Managers across ARTs and shared services.
• Work closely with key partners throughout the organization to understand challenges and requirements.
• Communicate program/domain/business knowledge across the company.
• Understand the Enterprise Data team's current state capabilities, core responsibilities, and vision for the future state to the degree vital to enable your teams to effectively prioritize work and provide solutions.
• Drive decision-making, building compelling cases, prioritization, and the necessary development and implementation to effect meaningful change to the infrastructure supporting Investment Operations.
• You will be involved in vendor solution assessments focused on data product/master data solutions.

Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s degree or equivalent related work experience.
• A combination of 5+ years of experience in the following: financial services, exposure to investments, and working in a role responsible for product strategy/vision/roadmaps in an Agile environment.
• Proven experience in managing and developing teams, particularly Product Owners and Business Analysts is a plus.
• Extensive knowledge of investment data and its usage in trading, portfolio management, data analytics, and reporting.
• Basic understanding of data stores, data models, and AWS services.
• Prior experience in building enterprise-wide data and ETL solutions.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and motivational skills.
• The ability to learn new tools and technologies to work optimally in a rapidly growing environment.
• Demonstrates the American Century Investments Winning Behaviors: Client Focused, Courageous and Accountable, Collaborative, Curious and Adaptable, Competitively Driven, Adheres to the highest ethical standards and business practices, and Supports a culture of compliance.
• Product Manager certification (preferred).
• Scaled Agile (SAFe) experience (preferred).

Additional Requirements

Employees are required to be in the office on a scheduled frequency. Adherence to this schedule is essential to fulfilling the expectations of the role.

American Century Investments is committed to complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act and all other applicable Equal Employment Opportunity laws and regulations. As such, American Century strives to provide a reasonable accommodation to any qualified individual under the ADA to perform essential job functions.

American Century Investments believes all individuals are entitled to equal employment opportunity and advancement opportunities without regard to race, religious creed, color, sex, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age for individuals forty years of age and older, military and veteran status, sexual orientation, and any other basis protected by applicable federal, state and local laws. ACI does not discriminate or adopt any policy that discriminates against an individual or any group of individuals on any of these bases.

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