Product Manager I

What You'll Do

About the Role

At Principal, we prioritize achieving excellence and providing top-tier solutions. As a Product Manager I, you will be essential in defining important business goals, understanding customer needs, and crafting product requirements for our medium complexity products. This role presents an outstanding opportunity to collaborate with cross-functional teams to effectively deliver valuable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Responsible for grasping and outlining essential business results, customer demands, and product specifications for designated products.
• Find opportunities and problems to solve, articulating hypotheses that drive product discovery and delivery activities.
• Lead product discovery efforts in partnership with engineering, development, analytics, and business collaborators.
• Collaborate with product teams to ideate, prioritize, and complete experiments that validate business and customer value.
• Own and prioritize the product backlog, define user stories, acceptance criteria, and success metrics.
• Serve as Product Owner for Agile Scrum teams and participate actively in planning, refinement, review, and retrospective ceremonies.
• Partner with engineering teams to remove delivery impediments and manage cross-team dependencies.
• Ensure product teams possess the business, customer, and partner context necessary to deliver valuable solutions effectively.
• Monitor product health, business outcomes, and adoption metrics to assess product performance and guide future investment decisions.
• Communicate product vision, strategy, roadmap, priorities, and outcomes to collaborators and leadership teams.
• Work together with various partners throughout business and technology groups to promote successful product adoption and readiness for change.

Who You Are

Requirements

• 8+ years of overall professional experience.
• Bachelor’s degree or comparable experience.
• 5+ years of Product Management experience working in a highly collaborative, fast-paced environment with product, business, and engineering teams.
• Demonstrated experience in product lifecycle management, backlog management, and roadmap planning.
• Experience defining business requirements and translating customer needs into product capabilities.
• Experience managing multiple priorities and delivering outcomes in Agile environments.
• Strong collaborator management, communication, and influencing skills.
• Demonstrated ability to leverage metrics and insights to support data-driven decision-making.
• Experience directing cross-functional discussions and achieving consensus among business and technology partners.

Preferred Qualifications

Familiarity with actuarial concepts relevant to Defined Benefit plans and Pension Risk Transfer, including the product, calculation, and operational complexities of lump-sum distributions and annuitization of retirement benefits, to accelerate understanding of customer, business, and regulatory considerations outstanding in the pension industry.

Abilities

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong elicitation, facilitation, and collaborator management capabilities.
• Experience driving prioritization and backlog refinement discussions.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Data-driven approach with the ability to derive insights from business and product metrics.
• Working experience in Agile (Scrum/Kanban) environments.
• Hands-on experience with product management platforms such as Jira, Confluence, and Miro or comparable tools.
• Ability to influence decisions and collaborate effectively with both business and technology groups.
• Strong ownership approach with a focus on delivering measurable customer and business value.

Our Engineering Culture

Through our Agile/Lean DevOps environment centered on delivering value, we’ve fostered a culture of innovation and experimentation across our development teams. As a customer-focused organization, we work closely with our end users and product owners to understand and rapidly respond to emerging business needs. Collaboration is embedded into everything we do – from the products we craft to the quality service we provide. We’re driven by the belief that diversity of thought, background, and perspective is critical to crafting the best products and experiences for our customers.

Experience Principal

At Principal, we value connecting on both a personal and professional level. Together, we’re imagining a more purpose-led future for financial services – and that starts with you. Our success depends on the outstanding experiences, backgrounds, and talents of our employees. And we support our employees the same way we support our customers: with comprehensive, competitive benefit offerings crafted to protect their physical, financial, and social well-being. Check out our careers site to learn more about our purpose, values and benefits.