Staff Product Manager (HHS)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today’s digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, product managers are responsible for strategy, planning, execution, stakeholder management, and team health. Product managers partner with researchers, designers, engineers, client stakeholders, and others to inform their product decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to figure out what to build next and why.

Skylight supports HHS’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) across a growing portfolio of high-visibility work. New projects arrive quickly and often without clear scope. Our product team covers three areas:

• OCIO portfolio. Taking in and shaping new projects for OCIO.

• ATO/GRC tool replacement. Supporting modernization efforts for Authority to Operate and governance, risk, and compliance processes, on an aggressive timeline that involves many federal stakeholders.

• CTIR Intelligence Data Hub. A greenfield effort for HHS’s Cybersecurity and Resilience team (CTIR). It will consolidate threat intelligence sources such as ThreatConnect, Intel 471, Feedly, Google Threat Intelligence, and Splunk into a single, FedRAMP High–compliant workbench for analysts and leadership.

Across all three, client leadership believes moving too slowly is a bigger risk than being wrong.

As the lead product manager, you’ll be the team’s front door with OCIO and lead a small team of product managers, while likely owning a workstream of your own.

What to know going in

This is a player/coach role. You’ll report directly to Skylight’s contract leadership and work on the front lines with HHS and Skylight leadership.

The work is high-visibility, and priorities shift often. You’ll need to absorb new work quickly, learn enough to act, and come back with a plan, without waiting months to learn everything first. Sometimes you’ll push back with the client, and sometimes you’ll disagree and commit. Knowing the difference is crucial. You’ll do well here if you like showing early, imperfect work and iterating on it.

In this role, you’ll also serve as a people manager. As a manager, you’ll keep growing in your craft and contributing to client work, while also taking on responsibility for the people you manage — their development, their performance, and the conditions that help them do their best work.

What you’ll do

• Take in new requests from OCIO, find the real need behind each one, and shape it into scoped, prioritized work

• Build the lightweight scaffolding (intake, planning, and team rhythms) that lets the team move fast without adding overhead

• Own a product workstream of your own, translating user and stakeholder needs into a vision, roadmap, and prioritized backlog

• Partner with HHS and Skylight leadership as priorities shift, knowing when to push back and when to disagree and commit

• Build strong working relationships with the people you manage and actively support their development

• Coach individuals through growth, feedback, and day-to-day challenges

What we’re looking for

Basic qualifications

• Understand lean product principles and how to apply them (e.g., minimum viable product) at various stages of the product life cycle in order to mitigate risk, validate assumptions, and amplify learning

• Can develop a product strategy that is informed by an understanding of the problem to be solved, prioritizes outcomes over feature sets, and establishes the direction of the product over time (e.g., product roadmap), including success criteria

• Ability to execute the product strategy by breaking down the product’s scope into usable chunks of value that can be realized sooner rather than later, creating and maintaining a prioritized backlog with validated user stories, and facilitating team ceremonies over the course of the product’s iterations

• Understand how to engage in the process of human-centered design in order to better inform product direction

• Ability to collaborate with folks outside of your discipline, such as researchers, designers, engineers, and others, in order to get things done

• Ability to manage clients and stakeholders in a way that builds trust, alignment, and healthy environments for individuals and teams

• Understand the merits of different software development methodologies (e.g., agile, lean) and how to put them into practice

• Experience directly managing product managers, and a track record of standing up team systems and agile practices that stay lightweight and change as needs change

• Strong client-facing consulting experience, including taking in ambiguous…