Senior/Staff/Principal Technical Product Manager (U.S. Air Force)

About this role

About Skylight Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today’s digital world. If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists. The work we do matters. About the job At Skylight, product managers are responsible for strategy, planning, execution, stakeholder management, and team health. Product managers partner with researchers, designers, engineers, client stakeholders, and others to inform their product decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to figure out what to build next and why. A technical product manager specializes in products with significant technical depth — platforms, APIs, data systems, or modernization efforts — where product decisions depend on fluency with the underlying architecture and engineering tradeoffs. Skylight has partnered with the U.S. Air Force across multiple legacy modernization efforts. The work spans modernization of legacy systems, new capability development in multi-vendor environments, iteration on established platforms, all inside an agile transformation and broader organizational change. You’ll own product direction for a legacy modernization effort where the architecture, integrations, and vendor landscape shape what’s possible. Expect to make the technical tradeoffs legible to stakeholders, pair closely with your government partners, and put AI-assisted ways of working to use across the team. What to know going in Your first 30 days are about working with the Skylight team and government personnel, learning the client’s domain and organization, and enabling your government partners. Access to users varies from team to team, so you’ll need to get creative about how you reach them. The client is early- to mid-transformation, so expect organizational and operational change along the way. This role is contingent on Skylight being awarded the underlying contract. If we’re not awarded the contract, we’ll let you know promptly and discuss whether there are other opportunities that fit. What you’ll do Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts to build and ship high-impact products and services Translate needs from users and government partners into a product strategy, including vision, objectives, measures of success, product roadmap, and product backlog Manage the direction, scope, and priorities of the modernization effort, weighing architecture, integration, and migration tradeoffs alongside user needs Write user stories, prioritize stories, and build release plans Work in close partnership with government teams to transfer digital skills and product knowledge throughout the course of the project Creatively navigate bureaucratic challenges, paving the way for more intuitive processes in the future What we’re looking for Basic qualifications Understand lean product principles and how to apply them (e.g., minimum viable product) at various stages of the product life cycle in order to mitigate risk, validate assumptions, and amplify learning Can develop a product strategy that is informed by an understanding of the problem to be solved, prioritizes outcomes over feature sets, and establishes the direction of the product over time (e.g., product roadmap), including success criteria Ability to execute the product strategy by breaking down the product’s scope into usable chunks of value that can be realized sooner rather than later, creating and maintaining a prioritized backlog with validated user stories, and facilitating team ceremonies over the course of the product’s iterations Understand how to engage in the process of human-centered design in order to better inform product direction Ability to manage clients and stakeh