Product Manager

About NavaNava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple, effective, and accessible to all. Since 2013, federal, state, and local government agencies have trusted Nava to build transformative digital services to help people access public benefits. Meeting our mission is an opportunity to restore trust between people and public institutions. We focus on populations that are the least protected because the stakes are higher.

As a client services company, we work with government agencies to improve how people apply for benefits, navigate their health care, and more. We bill for our time, selling our expertise and problem-solving methodology to government clients. Our clients hire us to help improve their products and services so that their users and beneficiaries have a better customer experience.

These end-users—the humans who benefit from our work—are at the core of everything we do. We research beneficiaries’ needs to help our government clients better deliver on their missions, providing everyone at Nava opportunities to do meaningful, impactful work.

Position Summary

Nava is at the forefront of reimagining how our government serves its people, and we’re looking for a Product Manager to drive our vision forward.

You'll help us execute our mission of reimagining the digital services our government provides. Working directly with government partners and across Nava’s engineering, design, and business teams, you’ll create experiences that improve the lives of millions of Americans. You care deeply about end users and are passionate about crafting simple and usable solutions.

You'll work with government partners and cross-functional teams of engineers, designers, and project managers to set direction, scope product features, remove obstacles and barriers, and assess the business impact on a government contract.You will be uniquely positioned and empowered to make a huge impact on Nava's mission to reimagine how our government serves its people.

You think holistically and take pride in working through highly ambiguous situations to deliver value to users. You have a strong bias towards action when faced with incomplete information and communicate transparently to build consensus internally and externally.

What you'll do

• Define the vision, goals, and measures of success for the products and services you manage
• Work with designers, business analysts, and technical leads to discover and synthesize market research, user needs, business requirements, and technical approaches
• Define the direction, scope, and priority of projects, from high-level initiatives to specific features, user stories, and business metrics
• Work closely with cross-functional teams to develop and ship projects
• Proactively socialize, iterate on, and build buy-in for product initiatives with the team, government partners, and other contractors
• Collaborate with the project management team to prioritize roadmaps and inbound units of work
• Represent Nava’s outcome-centric and user-centric approach in discovery meetings with agencies and contractors
• Understand and communicate the needs of end users and population segments we serve and government partners we work with
• Measure product progress toward business goals or user needs and translate data insights into action
• Make tactical decisions to improve the design, define requirements, and generate stakeholder buy-in for our desired path forward

Required skills

• At least three (3) years of experience as a Product Manager of a cross-functional team
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• Experience running and/or shipping consumer web applications
• Ability to generate very strong product plans and build buy-in across the team, our government partners, and other contractors
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for technical, user experience, and project management trade-offs; enthusiastic communicator
• 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 define a product objective and logically reverse engineer the path and communications to achieve the objective
• Ability to identify market trends and shifts that will affect product direction and update plans based on future expectations
• An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative, and positive mindset