Manager Digital Product
  • Dallas, United States
  • 1-800-435-9792
Negotiatable
17 Feb 2022
Airline
Marketing
2-4 Years
Bachelor
Job Description

Southwest will provide a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth. Employees will be provided the same concern, respect, and caring attitude within the organization that they are expected to share externally with every Southwest Customer. 

Job Summary:

  • Manager Digital Product will bring to market improvements to the Company's digital products that help Customers utilize Southwest products and services. This role will craft new digital experiences that will be made available on Customer facing southwest.com desktop site, mobile website, and the Southwest app. All to help Customers and improve Southwest’s ability to be Most Loved, Most Efficient, and Most Profitable. 
  • Manager Digital Product will lead a Digital Product team composed of direct and indirect reports to identify problems to solve and build new digital solutions in Customer web and app experiences. The role will work as part of the Product Team and serve to achieve the team’s objectives by offering new digital product capabilities focused. 
  • The Manager Digital Product role will build relationships to seek out problems to solve, share, and collaborate with senior leaders and work directly with design, research, analysis, and engineering teams to build effective digital solutions to achieve programs objectives. 
  • The Manager Digital Product will use the team’s strengths, knowledge, and cross-functional partner’s guidance to build new digital experiences on Company websites and apps. Business Owners will surface pain points and opportunity areas for Customers within the product area to work hand-in-hand with them and the executive team, coupled that with the team’s knowledge to prioritize, scope, and design digital experiences. Examples may include new fare search capability, running a test with improved content on Trip Cards to better prepare Customers for travel, or ways to leverage existing and new technologies to better improve the product at key moments that matter. 
  • The Manager Digital Product position may partner with teams to rally around a common complex problem to solve, such as requesting and tracking a wheelchair request, adding a new capability to improve Cobrand card application rates, or improving the take rates of Inflight Entertainment product using our websites, app, or Inflight portal. 
  • This role will be supported with direct reports, including a Digital Product Owner, Insights Analyst, UX Designer, Content Developer, and UX Researcher. Some direct reports may be shared with other product teams. This team will also be composed of matrixed and dedicated engineers with Cohearts across desktop web, mobile web, and other systems at Southwest. This team will be leveraging agile ways of working to allow for swift and incremental development. Keen expertise crafting digital experiences along with comfort in various ways to develop software will be key. 
  • Manager Digital Product will craft the vision and roadmap for the digital product area and ensure improvements are delivered effectively and product value for the Company. This is a high-impact role with visibility across the Company. 
  • A successful Manager Digital Product will simply be fantastic at discovering and delivering digital solutions that Customers want to use and meet the program’s objectives. The Manager Digital Product will crave being out in the field and build relationships with Customers and Cohearts to understand their problems and be fanatical about wanting to solve problems with available technology. Empathy will be a strong suit, as will developing positive and supportive relationships. The role will be keen at motivating the product team to build great experiences efficiently and deeply guided by data. This position will know how to deploy changes that impact more than half a million daily Customers with the proper research, design, testing, and communication. The Manager Digital Product will enjoy keeping stakeholders and peers well informed about the team's plans and the results of product improvements. Finally, this position also knows when to propose take risks and when to pivot when things are not working as expected. 
  • Overall, this role will be most successful if the rest of the team is successful together. Fostering a sense of trust, camaraderie, and a strong vision will be key. Doing it from the heart, while also staying down to earth, humble, and with a laugh and a smile will make for an excellent fit at Southwest. 

Responsibilities:

  • Leads a specific product team with indirect and direct reports. Direct reports may include a Digital Product Owner, User Experience Designer, User Researcher, Insights Analyst, and other future roles. Indirect team members include engineers and agile team members within other departments at Southwest 
  • Cultivates, supports, and promotes an organizational culture that affords for high performance, high morale, integrity, trust, and Teamwork 
  • Attracts, develops, and retains individuals with skills, attitude, and experience necessary to enable the organization to meet goals/commitments 
  • Leverages knowledge of situational and strengths-based leadership by providing continuous coaching to improve team performance and hold the team accountable 
  • Recognizes and advocates for Team members and fosters their growth 
  • Identifies when the team may need additional leadership, resources, or skills to support its objectives and advocates with senior leadership as appropriate 

Product Management 

  • Leads product teams to craft compelling product strategy to drive business goals within the sphere of responsibility and maintains a clear product roadmap and backlog for effective alignment with stakeholders 
  • Thoroughly understands how to build effective digital experience leveraging the strengths of the product team that achieve an objective and delight users 
  • Astute at determining ways to leverage technology to solve goals and comfortable leveraging new technologies 
  • Holds product team’s accountable for delivering on business objectives and improving product KPIs while encouraging a testing and learning philosophy 
  • Leads individual contributors within Digital Products to deliver on product objectives best leveraging our available resources, and doing so in a cost-effective manner 
  • Fosters a data influenced approach by guiding the team to leverage the most effective ways to surface product problems and design solutions leveraging the strengths of the team 
  • Leads the team to develop business cases for product changes that may require additional resources and skills which require executive sponsorship and support 
  • Ensures team has the resources and capabilities to learn about evolving business needs, industry trends, and advancements in the fields of Marketing, Customer Experience, User Experience, and Digital. 
  • Develops strong and trusting relationships to enable effective collaboration with Southwest business teams, Southwest technology teams, and with Southwest partners and Customers 

Collaboration and Communication 

  • Collaborates closely with other Southwest leaders and their teams as well as peers in other Departments to develop aligned plans and strategies – is keen at developing long-lasting and supportive relationships across the enterprise 
  • Delivers clear, concise, and focused communication with Team, Leaders, and Partners while encouraging candid communication within the Team 

Other 

  • Must be able to meet any physical ability requirements listed on this description 
  • May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders 

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

People Leadership, Growth, and Development 

  • Ability to leverage situational leadership and strengths to develop and coach team members 
  • Ability and disposition to work in cross-functional and matrixed working environments 
  • Demonstrated diligence, follow-through is natural and tenacious at building a strong team to be their best together 
  • Must be team-oriented, collaborative, and willing to passionately advocate and articulate opinions while maintaining flexibility to incorporate others’ points of view 
  • Ability to indirectly and directly influence and motivate others to achieve and objectives 
  • Comfortable leading a cross-functional team comprised of Product Owners, User Experience Designers, Analytics, and User Researchers 
  • Comfortable exerting indirect influence in areas not directly under their control 
  • Must have the ability to assume a high level of responsibility and to provide direction in a cross-functional, team-oriented environment 

Product Management

  • A passion to lead a team to build experiences that Customers and that team members love to create together 
  • An uncanny ability to infuse Customer & Coheart empathy into a team to build trust while improving Southwest’s ability to be Most Loved, Most Efficient, and Most Profitable 
  • Intellectually curious; pro-actively identifies challenges and opportunities, curiosity includes being up to date with both current and planned or future state technologies and Customer trends 
    • Ability to quickly develop strong business acumen to fully understand how Southwest Airlines operates and how the product teams contribute to the bottom line with a low-cost mindset 
    • Ability to use and evangelize a scientific and hypothesis-driven approach to product management leveraging Customer research, market research, and a test & learn development approach to develop solutions to problems that are data-inspired and validated upon launch leveraging A/B testing 
    • Ability to think about the entire Company, and influence others to align on vision; advocates for what's best for the Company and the Customer and is not afraid to express and defend viewpoint in a respectful and collaborative manner 
    • Ability to lead product teams to engage with stakeholders from diverse backgrounds including Engineering, Finance, Operations, Marketing, Customer Experience and more 
    • Ability to craft long term product strategy that can be translated into near term objectives with minimal supervision resulting in a clear near-term roadmap 
    • Ability to design and improve digital products with significant dependency on technology 
    • Ability to develop creative solutions to complex difficult challenges leveraging digital platform capabilities (iOS, Android, browser platforms, etc.) as well as the capabilities of the Southwest Digital stack (personalization, targeting, A/B testing, reservation system capabilities, etc) 
    • Must have the drive and ability to produce top tier results while bringing others along 
    • Understands when to leverage User Research, Market Research, and Customer Research in the product development process 
    • Comfortable guiding team to leverage Design Thinking and Design Sprints to identify a product problem and consider the right solution, open to leveraging new ways to define problems to solve and ways to solve product problems 
    • Understands how to best guide team to craft new experiences when leveraging different technology development methodologies including agile and waterfall processes 
    • Understands how to guide the team to measure the business impact of a product change through the use of data analysis, A/B testing, and multivariate testing

Additional

    • Willingness to take on other ad hoc projects and requests as needed 
    • Excellent written and verbal communications and presentation skills 
    • A passion for the Customer, Technology, and the airline business is essential 
    • Strong ability to develop and deliver presentations to all levels of the organization; able to adapt content and delivery based on audience 
    • Communicates effectively by listening intently, questioning appropriately, and articulating clearly in both written and verbal formats 
    • Ability to demonstrate high emotional intelligence in various situations dealing with both internal and external resources 

Education:

  • Required: High School Diploma or GED 
  • Required: Bachelor's Degree 
  • Preferred: Advanced Degree 

Experience

  • Required: 3 years of experience in Product Management, Strategic Planning, Technology Strategy, Technology Management, Corporate Strategy; OR, Business consulting, or a minimum 2 years of experience with an advanced degree 

Preferred:  

  • Experience developing and leading digital product teams in the product management and user experience practices 
  • Familiarity with building Customer-facing digital experiences such as web, app, and kiosk  
  • Familiarity with analytical platforms such as Adobe Analytics Workspace 
  • Familiarity with A/B testing platforms such as Adobe Target 
  • Familiarity and experience with Content Management systems 
  • Familiarity with travel and hospitability product lines and processes 

Licensing/Certification 

    N/A

    • Physical Abilities 

      • Ability to perform work duties from limited space work station/desk/office area for extended periods of time 
      • Ability to communicate and interact with others in the English language to meet the demands of the job 
      • Ability to use a computer and other office productivity tools with sufficient speed and accuracy to meet the demands of the job 
    • Other Qualifications 

      • Must maintain a well-groomed appearance per Company appearance standards as described in established guidelines 
      • Must be a U.S. citizen or have authorization to work in the United States as defined by the Immigration Reform Act of 1986 
      • Must be at least 18 years of age 
      • Must be able to comply with Company attendance standards as described in established guidelines 

    Apply Now



    Jobseeker

    Looking for a Job?
    Apply now

    Companies

    Check All Companies
    View Now