Product Manager - Tech

Job Description

As television and media habits change, our mission remains true to the principles that founded Discovery – every day we seek to ignite people's curiosity to engage, entertain and enlighten the world around them through amazing viewing experiences.

The Direct to Consumer Group is a technology company within the Discovery brand. We are building a global streaming video platform (OTT) and a suite of applications to support all of our network's brands globally. Our platform covers everything from search, catalog, video transcoding, personalization, to global subscriptions, and much more. We are building modern container-based micro-services operated on AWS. We build user experiences ranging from classic lean-back viewing to interactive learning applications. We build applications for connected TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets, and consoles for a large footprint of Discovery owned networks (Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, Discovery Play, and many more). This is a growing, global engineering group crucial to Discovery's future. We are hiring senior technical product managers to join our global video platform team. Our team focuses on all aspects of streaming video: live and VOD pipelines, metadata management, server-side ad insertion, CDN integrations, playback services, video player backends, AI/ML-based personalization, and ad tech.
Our team is looking for an experienced platform product manager to help shape and develop the next generation of our video metadata management platform. This role will own the development of platform services for video and metadata ingestion and processing; and editing and serving metadata to various backend services, tools, and applications. He or she will work closely with inventory team, operations team, and teams responsible for various backend services (publishing platforms, analytics, personalization etc) to capture use cases and requirements and work with platform architects to build a solid foundation with reliable and extensible APIs.

The ideal candidate has a track record of having product managed multiple high-performance, stable, scalable systems that have been successfully shipped to customers in production. Your work and your approach to work are exemplary: you drive best practices and set standards for your team. You show good judgement making trade-offs between immediate and long-term business needs. You are a collaborative partner that makes other team members around you more productive by sharing your knowledge and providing a clear prioritized product roadmap. You provide mentoring to others.

Responsibilities
• Partner with engineering and operational stakeholders to ensure a solid platform that meets requirements, is reliable, and is flexible to allow for further evolution.
• Partner with key stakeholders at different Discovery brands to understand their current platform needs and anticipate future platform needs. You will need to gather and synthesize requirements from many different brands across a diverse set of geographies, time zones, and use cases into a single product roadmap that can serve them all.
• Bring analytic rigor to decisions around product direction, priorities, and scope, describing the pros and cons of different options in a way that a distributed team can come to a decision on the right course of action.
• Maintain a prioritized product roadmap for your area, and present the status of that roadmap on a regular basis to stakeholders, other teams, and executives
• Create and review detailed functional designs and FAQs that unambiguously specify all public behaviors and interfaces, provide test examples, enumerate and describe all edge conditions, and define operational success criteria and KPI goals, which will then be used by engineering for technical designs. Technical product management will provide the ''why'' and the ''what'', while engineering provides the ''how''.
• Make sure your designs fit into the larger DTC platform, collaborating with other teams on consistency and cross-team integrations, leveraging existing patterns and strategies, and staying up to date on high-level roadmaps and challenges across different teams.
• Regularly engage stakeholders and external teams to communicate the status of various in-flight development, and anticipate the result of schedule changes to other teams
• Analyze and track operational KPIs that you own, finding the right roadmap blend between new feature work and maintenance/sustained engineering. You will be responsible for maintaining the general operational snapshot of your feature area and presenting it as necessary.
• Do outreach and evangelism to brands and other platform teams, maintaining and presenting the roadmap presentation for your area
• Act as the subject-matter expert for your product area for people outside of their team.
• Contribute to and review documentation for public-facing APIs and features
• Research potential partners to accelerate our roadmap by creating evaluation criteria, connecting and managing relationships with partners, and prototyping potential integrations

Requirements
• Proven experience as a product leader: at least 5 years technical product management experience in a software product development environment including direct experience in operational cloud computing applications.
• A BS degree in computer science or a related technical field.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong sense of responsibility and ownership for the success of projects from inception to rollout and maintenance.
• Must have the legal right to work in the United States

Preferred Skills & Experience
• Experience building multi-tenant cloud-based platform services.
• Demonstrated ability of intra- and inter-team collaboration
• Experience working with video supply chains or metadata management systems

Nearest Major Market: Seattle

Nearest Secondary Market: Bellevue

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r1ob5e-18-119-104-238-42 in your application.