Sr. Product Manager - Excise

Job Description

The Senior Product Manager will work with and report to the Senior Director of Product Management as part of the product management team for Avalara's Excise products. In this role the roadmap and product development will be driven to support advancement of Excise products to pursue multiple segments of customers including enterprise, government, and SMB. The goal is to drive integration with ERPs, and e-commerce platforms, while simultaneously supporting customer defined integrations using flexible tools and processes to conform to many different customer Excise taxation requirements.

Responsibilities:

• Work with sales, professional services, and directly with customers to understand the needs of different customer segments
• Become an expert in motor fuel and tobacco taxes
• Articulate a clear and compelling product strategy that synthesizes customer needs, market dynamics, and business requirements
• Create prioritized roadmaps that deliver customer value
• Define metrics that measure the success of products, and use these metrics to drive business outcomes
• Develop clear, detailed, and actionable product requirements in partnership with design, user experience, and engineering teams
• Serve as an agile product owner to ensure engineering execution aligns with the roadmap
• Build alignment and collaborate effectively with other internal stakeholders to ensure effective product launches and a great customer experience
• Drive strategic cross-product and cross-functional initiatives that will help transform Avalara's business and improve the customer experience
• Work with the GM for Excise to create solutions that will enable growth, global expansion, and integration with Avalara's core platform services and ecosystem
• Communicate product strategy and roadmap with customers, partners, and executives---achieving understanding and alignment of prioritization decisions through transparency, collaboration, and with customer-evidenced conviction
• Provide leadership and contributions to a data-driven product discipline of continuous discovery and continuous validation that enables quick iterations, testing, and learning
• Improve the planning and execution of epics, sprints, and product delivery
• Lead the development of customer-focused learning and documentation to ensure that customers have the knowledge required to efficiently use Excise products

Qualifications:

• 8+ years overall professional related experience, bachelor's degree, with a mix of startup and big company perspectives
• 5+ years of experience as a SaaS product manager, leading product at multiple lifecycle stages; facing multiple business challenges such as high growth, quick time to market, quality, and technology migrations; and serving customer bases that will span small business owners, and enterprise as well as mass market and vertical niches
• Experience with agile development methodologies, the Product Owner role, and commonly used tools such as Jira, Confluence, etc.
• Experience with customer journey maps to create end to end customer experience within product
• Demonstrated experience partnering cross functionally, including with executives and other internal stakeholders to drive business outcomes
• Operate with the highest degree of integrity, behave consistently based on high moral standards, do the right thing, and lead with intellectual honesty
• Master problem solver, highly data-driven, and demonstrated intellectual horsepower, creativity, analytical, curious, with a growth mindset
• User-centered focus, able to demonstrate and practice empathy in product thinking, know how to define journeys and drive product execution aligned to journeys and workflows
• Focused and disciplined with a strong ability to prioritize, organize thoughts, and organize the work in a structured and consumable way
• Strong goal-orientation, selective, and not easily distracted
• Strong collaborator with a sense of empathy, know how to disagree-and-commit, can break down organizational barriers
• Flexibility to travel for conferences, customer visits, and in-office Avalara meetings

Preferred Qualifications
• Excise experience with motor fuel, tobacco, tax returns, electronic filing, uniformity would be a plus
• Software development background, knowledge of databases, SQL