About Nava

Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple and effective. Since 2015, 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 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.

Please note: the level of the role will be determined by Nava leadership based on experience and skillset.

Position summary

The Principal Product Manager’s purpose is to work collaboratively with client stakeholders and cross-functional team members to define and execute on the vision and strategy for software products and services. A Principal Product Manager leads teams to iteratively deliver working software that meets user needs and business goals, working collaboratively with designers, engineers, project managers, and stakeholders. Responsibilities include translating user needs and business goals into product requirements, defining user flows and other aspects of system behavior, documenting product specifications, and analyzing product metrics.

What you'll do

Determining user needs and business requirements through stakeholder interviews and user research, often in collaboration with designer/researchers
Defining the product vision, strategy, and roadmap showing how increments of working software will be delivered to achieve business goals
Defining user flows, system behavior, and other product specifications that enable team members to design and build working software
Defining quarterly or program increment goals to establish near- and mid-term milestones for delivering working software
Iterating on the product vision, strategy, and roadmap as the team learns from feedback
Collaborating with stakeholders to understand their goals and constraints, and using this information to determine product priorities
Building and maintaining trust with stakeholders by continuously aligning on a shared vision and set of priorities, and demonstrating how the team is delivering on this vision
Coordinating across teams to implement software according to the roadmap and adapt based on learnings
Breaking software features down into user stories or tasks that can be worked on in a sprint
Collaboratively prioritizing and refining the backlog of user stories and tasks to reflect product priorities
Defining sprint goals; leading and contributing to sprint planning discussions that enable designers and engineers to design and build software features
Ensuring that user stories have clear descriptions and acceptance criteria so that design and engineering tasks can be evaluated for completeness
Reviewing product designs and working software to reflect the desired behavior and performance
Engaging with stakeholders for approval of key decisions about how software products and services will function
Coordinating and communicating decisions with the team and with stakeholders, using evidence gained from research and analysis
Ensuring stakeholders are kept up to date on software implementation progress, blockers, and risks
Ensuring teams with dependencies on each other’s work are coordinating and communicating to deliver features that function as expected
Resolve or escalate blockers that impede successful delivery, involving the team as needed
Defining metrics to be used to track the success of a software product or feature