Product Manager - Labs

Job Description

Do you get excited about defining the future? Are you interested in making your mark in the digital and broadcast media landscape? Do you want a product management position unlike any other, one that doesn't just evolve existing products and services, but also breaks the ground for entirely new ones? If so, we'd love to talk to you about joining Sinclair Broadcast Group's Innovation Labs team.

We are looking for a Product Manager to research and scope the Labs team's hypothesis, experiment, and proof-of-concept initiatives, and will include exploration of opportunities around collaborative content creation, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and augment/virtual/mixed reality. This role will contribute to corporate innovation initiatives that have visibility up to the CxOs. This is not a purely ''R&D'' role, but one that contributes to the corporate bottom line by finding, validating, and unlocking new value for customers, users, and the business. The closest analogy for the type of work that the Innovation Labs does is that of a group running several time-boxed, lean startup experiments in parallel.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

You will work with executive leaders, other stakeholders, and other product managers to identify projects for the Labs team that deliver new feature capabilities in our existing digital products or create entirely new digital products. Innovation Labs doesn't put these new features or products into production. Labs does the experiments and creates demonstrations and proofs-of-concepts that show our product teams what's possible.

WHAT TO BRING
• Experience as a customer-centric, technically savvy Product Manager who has worked in a lean startup or similar digital innovation environment
• Domain Knowledge of the News, Media, Entertainment, or Advertising industries
• The ability to dream up new ideas that solves problems and unlocks value for customers, users, and the business, and the detail-orientation and communication skills needed to scope the opportunity for stakeholders and the development team

RESPONSIBILITIES

As a Product Manager, Innovation Labs, you will be reporting to the Senior Director of Product Strategy and expected to...
• Develop and maintain a roadmap/backlog of initiatives that illustrates and communicates a vision, positioning and plan for current and future innovation opportunities
• Support corporate digital and content innovation initiatives
• Provide thought leadership by assessing societal, technical, and business trends, and identifying and prioritizing innovation initiatives designed to reduce threats and capitalize on these emerging opportunities
• Identify and validate customer and user needs through research, experimentation, and market data
• Collaborate with executives and other stakeholders on the prioritization of Labs initiatives
• Develop and validate sets of hypotheses on market & customer problems
• Work with development team members to develop user stories for current and future initiatives based on validated market & customer problems
• Drive buy-build-partner analysis, and where necessary, review potential partner relationships for the experiments
• Work with sales and leadership to define and support potential sales objectives within experiments
• Leverage product data analytics to manage key performance indicators and operational key results for your experiments
• Support the transition to productization of successful experiments with product delivery (development, sales, training, advertising, and support) teams
• Inspire stakeholders, executives and delivery teams by clearly communicating innovation vision and execution designed to deliver measurable business impact
• Collaborate with Labs team members to scope, plan, execute, and assess their experimentation
• Establish and maintain clear communication with stakeholders, executives, and team members that accurately provide guidance and status of innovation roadmaps, prioritization, approaches, and initiatives
• Continue professional and technical education, attending workshops, seminars, etc.

Tactical Focus:
• Decompose Labs initiatives into and operating plan and supporting epics
• Decompose epics into user stories and define acceptance criteria
• Manage and prioritize an innovation initiatives backlog
• Contribute to Agile ceremonies
• Set sprint goals
• Establish the tone and narrative for team bi-weekly demos to Vice Presidents and other stakeholders
• Follow progress of work and address research and development issues during sprints
• Collaborate with other Labs team members to clarify requirements, set priorities, establish necessary tradeoffs and unblock the team when assessing options on how to proceed
• Contribute to the fun

Qualifications:

The ideal candidate will have...
• 4+ years of experience planning, leading and implementing customer- and business-centric product strategies for lean startups or innovative and agile software development teams
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Product Design, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 2+ years of product management experience with digital news, media, entertainment, or advertising creation, publishing, and distribution
• 2+ years of experience delivering responsive websites, mobile apps, feed syndication, and related technologies
• Experience with either artificial intelligence/machine intelligence, data science, block chain, or augmented/virtual/mixed reality
• Knowledge of user-centric design and branding deliverables such as user flows, wireframes, and style guides
• Strong experience communicating to management and stakeholders using written and verbal skills.
• Expertise in personal organization, time management, decision-making and problem-solving.
• SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager certification or Pragmatic Certified a big plus.
• Ability and willingness to occasionally travel for company business, when conditions permit.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and Drug Free Workplace!

*LI-SP1

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-reoq38-3-145-131-28-42 in your application.