Senior Product Release Manager

The duties and responsibiliites of the Senior Product Release Manager include:

Project Leadership:

• Lead cross functional team designed to coordinate all major software releases.
• Overcome team challenges without direct line reporting relationships.

Detailed Project Planning:

• Determine project scope through design, development and market release.
• Use desired outcomes to manage feature set, delivery date, product quality and resource requirements.
• Determine and manage release plan, including major milestones and status reporting.

Project Management:

• Prepare and mange project details using Microsoft Project and related utilities.
• Confirm status of deliverables vs. plan/metrics, etc.
• Manage sub-projects such as alpha, beta and release candidate.
• Manage potential vendor relationships to ensure deliverables.
• Maintain the master project plan and related reports.

Project Modeling:

• Understand and model our capacity to deliver projects.
• Develop models to use for resource allocation for future project estimation. 

ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE and SKILLS:

Education and Training:   Bachelor’s degree and 7-10 years of software project or program management experience required.  Significant experience with enterprise software projects and the breadth of project management required for their development, implementation and maintenance is required.   Master’s degree preferred.
     
Specialized Knowledge & Skills:  Direct experience across a range of functions throughout the software development lifecycle and the knowledge of the project vocabulary and roles within them is required, and experience with agile methodologies in particular is a plus.  Experience in software rollout to market and related project planning is extremely valuable.  Specific experience in supporting or delivering key software services including documentation, support, implementation planning and customer configuration management are of direct value in this position.  Similarly, experience managing release criteria and communications with internal teams such as sales and marketing is of high value.

Successful candidates will also have proven experience in the following areas:
 
Organization Skills

• Excellent organizational skills and attention to detail.
• Must have positive history and experience organizing volumes of information and data related to a living project.
• Must have Microsoft Project software experience.
• Specific competencies with dependency modeling and reporting are required.

Software Packaging Domain Experience

• Strong experience with hosted and packaged software deliverables.
• Significant experience of one model and basic knowledge of the other is a minimum requirement.

Software Development Lifecycle Experience

• Experience in traditional waterfall methods of software development is valuable.
• Managing projects using modern methods such as rapid prototyping, agile or scrum is a significant benefit.

Post Development Release Coordination and Organizational Experience

• Experience in released to market software a must.
• Significant experience in working with non-development personnel and process is required.
• Positive work history in coordination with sales, marketing and service functions within an organization.
• Specific experiences with these functional areas a plus:  documentation, user education, application hosting, technical consulting and/or program consulting. 

Communication and Arbitration Skills

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ranging from technical communication status to executive communication regarding progress against schedule and associated project risks.
• Experience arbitrating resource issues, scope, content and schedule is a must. Personal references will be required.

Alpha/Beta/Pre-Release Candidate Program Experience

• Ability to achieve appropriate coordination with customers and the change management cycle will be important.
• Experience in developing these programs and coordinating customer feedback is highly valuable.

Project Budgeting and Reporting

• Significant experience with budgeting and resource modeling isrequired – project accounting rather than financial accounting.
• Ability to capture and present progress information is crucial to the role.
• Mastery level reporting skills for project status and actual vs. plan performance is required.
• Experience in risk identification and reporting is an important addition

The position is based in our Indianapolis headquarters. If our collaborative, energetic environment is a fit for you, we want to hear from you.  Please email your resume to jobs@angellearning.com.