Freelance Product Delivery Lead
1 month ago
ustwo is seeking an experienced Lead Product Manager to join our New York team. ustwo is known for delivering exceptional digital products and collaborating closely with clients to conceptualize, prototype, and bring to life complex digital solutions. This cross-functional role oversees client program requirements and overall project health, while collaborating across a range of product disciplines globally, including Strategy, Design, Technical & Engineering teams, Operations, and Business Development.
In this role, you will work with internal and external stakeholders to define product requirements, prioritize specifications, and create a roadmap to execution and delivery, while demonstrating the value of our final deliverables.
As a Product Manager, you’ll have a proven track record of successfully delivering a diverse range of projects. This particular role represents a blend between product management and project management skill sets, allowing you to leverage your expertise in both areas. We are seeking a candidate who promotes a self-organized team and leads continuous improvement to our processes informed by Agile best practices, while also playing a pivotal role in guiding your team's decision-making and offering support in the face of challenges, risks, and client interactions.
What You'll Do
- Serve as a liaison between client stakeholders and cross functional leads to gather product and project requirements, prioritize tasks and features, and identify dependencies and risks.
- Work with our internal teams to define, evaluate, and prioritize project dependencies, assumptions, and the overall roadmap, while also formulating detailed implementation strategies.
- Lead the end-to-end delivery of a range of technical, design-led, and strategic vision-type projects, overseeing the execution of sprints, maintaining team members’ accountability and velocity, and exceeding clients' expectations for quality and value.
- Manage complete product life cycles and experimental pilots, tailoring agile methodologies to best suit each project's unique needs.
- Act as a practitioner of agile best practices, crafting and leading workshops or project ceremonies for both internal teams and clients, promoting collaboration and resulting in tangible outputs.
- Assume a prominent client-facing role, steering project direction and maintaining overall account health through effective prioritization of stakeholders, including clients, partners, and relevant third parties.
- Be adept at translating complex product offerings and technical recommendations into terms that are meaningful, simple to understand, and executable.
- Support the existing cross-disciplinary teams with pitching and proposal efforts in their tasks to unpack new briefs, craft project approaches, and create proposal decks.
Location
This role could be hybrid with 1-2 days in our Brooklyn studio, or fully remote if in EST time zone but we'd love you to work alongside us!
Time frame
This role is expected to potentially start in mid July for 8 weeks minimum. There is opportunity for this role to continue depending on project outcomes and bandwidth.
Your Skills
- Navigate competing external and internal cross-functional demands with finesse, fostering open discussions and informed decisions that align with project and stakeholder needs.
- Maintain a holistic understanding of project status and priorities while attending to necessary details to keep daily operations moving forward in alignment with the project’s roadmap.
- Communicate with clarity and precision, effortlessly articulating updates that balance action-oriented directives with necessary details for both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Leverage data to guide decision-making, and when there’s no data, find alternative sources to gain insights.
- Exhibit a deep affinity for digital technologies and a knowledge of best practices within the space, with a flair for pushing boundaries and creating innovative solutions.
- Experience using collaboration, design, and project management tools such as Asana, Miro, Figma, and Google Suite.
Your Experience
- Accumulated a minimum of 8 years of experience delivering impactful work in agencies, studios, or comparable settings, with a strong focus on digital experiences that captivate clients and interdisciplinary teams.
- Successfully led and shipped at least one significant consumer-facing project that stands as a testament to your professional development, complemented by a portfolio of smaller projects that showcase your evolving strategies for client collaboration.
- Proficient in championing and practicing agile methodologies, harnessing their power to drive collaboration, client engagement, and project completion.
We’d love it if you also…
- Have a passion for playing video and board games, and/or have worked on projects that are game-adjacent.
- Have a passion for AI products and technology, particularly how AI can be leveraged to help improve users’ lives.
- Are confident in dealing with project finances such as crafting budgets, invoicing clients, and tracking burn.
This is a full-time/40-hour a week contract position.
ustwo combines expertise in product and service development, ventures and gaming to make a meaningful impact on the challenges companies and individuals face in contemporary culture.
Over the years, we have been carving out a reputation in the space between digital product development and new experience design.
Our deep product development knowledge, our design heritage and our leadership at the edges of technology and culture, means we are capable of providing fresh creative and strategic direction on genuinely new experiences, as well as deep technical expertise on implementation - never disconnecting strategy from implementation.
This combination of capabilities is rare and valuable, particularly in a market that’s seeing ever-increasing convergence of entertainment, gaming, content, commerce, and platforms.