The Jon Renau Director of Product Development oversees the entire lifecycle of the company’s products ensuring a seamless transition from conception to launch; responsible for driving innovation, managing the product lifecycle, ensuring our products meet market demands & customer expectations while aligning with business goals.
- Strategize, plan, and execute initiatives to bring innovative products to market.
- Sets the direction and goals for the product portfolio, aligning them with the business objectives and customer needs.
- Define the product vision, roadmap, and value proposition, and communicate them clearly and persuasively to internal and external stakeholders.
- Guide product design, development, and testing phases, ensuring alignment with business goals
- Market analysis, identifying customer needs, and collaborating with cross-functional teams.
- Monitor market trends, competitors, and feedback and adjust the strategy accordingly
- Manage timelines, budgets, and risk mitigation, identifying challenges & implementing solutions throughout the product process
- Fosters a cohesive work environment, liaise with stakeholders
- Fosters transparent communication, manage stakeholder expectations, providing realistic timelines and addressing concerns.
- Serves a crucial role in stakeholder management, handling relationships and expectations from internal and external parties
- Oversees the execution and delivery of the product development process, ensuring that it follows the best practices and standards.
- Manage the product backlog, prioritize the features, and allocate the resources.
- Collaborate with the design, quality assurance, and marketing teams, and provide guidance and feedback throughout the development cycle.
- Measure and evaluate the product performance, quality, and user satisfaction, and identify areas for improvement.
Team Management:
- Sets the tone for a creative and forward-thinking approach, empowering the product development team to push boundaries and iterate on concepts to suit customers
- Championing innovation, they ensure the team remains agile and adaptable to changing market dynamics.
- Responsible for driving innovation and experimentation within the team.
- Inspire a culture of curiosity and risk-taking, urging team members to explore novel ideas and test hypotheses.
- Encourage a mindset of continuous learning, provides resources and support for experimentation, fostering an environment where failure is viewed as a valuable learning experience.
- Create a framework and environment for generating, validating, and prototyping new concepts, and support the team in conducting user research, market analysis, and data-driven experiments.
- Facilitate the learning and sharing of insights and best practices from the experiments, and promote a culture of continuous improvement and learning.
- leads and mentors the product team, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and customer-centricity.
- Hire, train, and develop the product managers, designers, and empower them to make decisions and solve problems.
- Set the expectations, roles, and responsibilities for the team, and provide regular feedback, recognition and performance management.
- Resolve any conflicts or issues that arise within or across the teams.
Skills, Knowledge & Abilities
- A director of product development is expected to have a combination of technical, business, and leadership skills, as well as relevant experience and qualifications.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in business, or a related field with at least 5-10 years of experience in product management, preferably in a senior or leadership role.
- Proven track record of delivering successful and impactful products from ideation to launch and beyond.
- Knowledge of the product development methodologies, tools, and best practices such as agile, scrum, lean, design thinking is essential.
- Solid knowledge of the market, customer, and competitor trends and be able to translate them into product opportunities and solutions.
- Analytical, problem-solving, decision-making skills are required along with the ability to use data and metrics to inform and validate product decisions.
- Communication, presentation, persuasion skills are also necessary for articulating and aligning the product vision, strategy, and value proposition to various audiences.
- Exceptional leadership, management, mentoring skills.
- Reputation for inspiring, motivating, and empowering your product team and stakeholders.
- A creative mindset with the ability to generate new ideas and concepts is also essential.