Sr. Product Manager

Primary Function:

Zoro is creating innovative ecommerce solutions that are transforming the way small and medium businesses find, buy and get the stuff they need to serve their customers. We are looking for passionate, driven people who want to join a high-energy, fast-learning team focused on rapid growth.

The Senior Product Manager sits at the strategic helm of Zoro customers’ experiences and is one of the most important roles to Zoro’s path forward. This position will take ownership of a slice of the Zoro.com experience and solve customer problems to drive positive outcomes that help Zoro grow and scale as it helps users find the products they need across our endless aisle. The ideal candidate has a passion for discovering and acting on user behavior and feedback and leaning on empathy and creativity to uncover ways to make Zoro.com better. The Senior Product Manager Reports directly to the Head of Product Management, has no direct reports, and will take an active part in mentoring junior members of the team.

The Senior Product Manager will collaborate daily with user experience architects, user interface designers, software engineers, category merchants, product analysts, data scientists and product operations and project management talent to launch and iterate features onto Zoro.com. This role will own the strategy and Roadmap a section of the user experience and will work directly with multiple development teams and Zoro stakeholders to prioritize and deliver the right solutions. The right candidate will strive to strike a balance between driving critical short-term outcomes that ladder to Zoro’s top priorities and goals and longer-term, scalable delivery that will position the business to continue its history of success.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Understand the drivers of Zoro’s business and the most significant levels that improve the underlying drivers of value.
• Talk directly to Zoro customers and create frequent feedback loops across the Zoro.com experience to identify friction points and areas for improvement or enhancement.
• Collaborate with business, technology and Product leadership to define and communicate the vision, critical outcomes and North Star metrics for multiple Product teams in one area of the Zoro.com experience.
• Prioritize user problems into a simple, widely-visible Roadmap that shows prioritization of outcomes teams should focus research and discovery efforts.
• Remain in touch with the pulse of how users are interacting with Zoro.com by establishing, monitoring and acting on key leading and lagging indicators.
• Collaborate with technical, product design, analytics, merchandising, data science and other experts to determine the right approach to solving customer problems that balances short-term delivery with iteration to scale.
• Own and prioritize the backlog for a portfolio of experiences on Zoro.com that will be delivered by multiple agile teams, including new functionality, feature enhancements, enabling technology, performance improvements, technical and design debt, and defects.
• Maintain and educate about an effective testing strategy to determine the impact of changes to the user experience, and collaborate with analytics experts to ensure effective measurement of and iteration base on test results.
• Collaborate daily with an agile development team to determine acceptance criteria and Definitions of Done for all delivery, conduct final User Acceptance Testing of completed design and code, and clarify direction and prioritization of delivery.
• Build and manage relationships with outside vendors and technology providers.
• Manage communication and training for new features across the organization and to customers when necessary.
• Maintain competitive and marketplace awareness through research and analysis of current best-in-class and emerging techniques.
• Act as mentor to other Product Managers and business stakeholders in continuous delivery, measuring customer and Product success,

Requirements:

• Empathetic, balanced, articulate and persuasive team member who can effectively work with leadership, and who is able to communicate concepts to a broad range of technical and non-technical talent.
• Proven track record of gathering requirements and translating into user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Ability to build strong interpersonal relationships with partners in Customer Service, User Experience, User Interface design, Quality Assurance, Software Engineering, Architecture, Data Science, Analytics, Digital Merchandising, Marketing, and more.
• Ability to give clear and consistent vision of an initiative or problem to solve to technical teams and stakeholders.
• Exceptional writing proficiency and oral presentation skills.
• Ability to develop, lead, motivate and supervise working teams.
• Excellent analytical skills and proven ability to understand and clearly explain technology.
• May require limited travel (less than 10%) 1-2 times per year for partner visits.
• Has a passion for identifying business opportunities through providing an awesome customer experience.
• Demonstrates the Zoro Values of Transparency, Ownership, Winning and Losing Together, and Customer Obsession.

Experience and Education:

• Bachelor’s Degree in a related field required, preferably in business, engineering or another technology-focused field, or equivalent experience. Master’s Degree a plus. 
• 5+ years’ of Product Management experience, with an emphasis on customer-facing products and B2B Ecommerce, demonstrating a basic level of understanding of the MRO industry. 
• 5+ years of full-time experience managing the strategy, and Roadmap and execution of key business initiatives, marketing, user experience, or eCommerce projects. 
• 2-3 years’ experience using Google Analytics or similar software. 
• 3-5 years of direct experience working in an agile product development environment with a detailed understanding of the role of the Product Owner in the Scrum framework. 
• Experience with the Atlassian software suite, especially Jira and Confluence software, or other enterprise-level delivery and workflow software.