ASICS Apps - Runkeeper (Senior) Product Manager

at  ASICS Apps

ASICS Apps lives by ASICS’ founding philosophy, “Anima Sana In Corpore Sano” or “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body.” We believe in the positive benefits of movement and aspire for people all over the world to live healthful and happy lives in both body and mind.
The ASICS Apps provide digital services and goods focused on helping runners and running events every step of the way. To strengthen our commitment to runners, we are expanding our investment in endurance-related digital services, such as endurance event technology (Race Roster), leading mobile running app (the ASICS Runkeeper app), and other exciting platforms that will help us better serve the endurance industry. Combined, these projects and products makeup ASICS Apps.
Our mission―in the past, today, and into the future―is to contribute to a healthful and sustainable society and to bring joy to the people of the world through movement. Movement is an important element in living longer healthy lives, in feeling more fulfilled, and in crossing national and cultural boundaries to bring the world together. If you are looking to join a fun and innovative company focused on the booming digital health and fitness industry, this is the place for you!
Position Overview
As a (Senior) Product Manager on the Runkeeper team, you will be responsible for a specific experience and feature set within the Runkeeper product. You will be relied upon to deeply understand the needs of our users and the ASICS business, and to balance those needs as you make product decisions. You will also engage and build effective relationships with all key cross functional teams and stakeholders to anticipate needs, communicate decisions, and foster connection, collaboration, and alignment across the organization. Day to day, you will be responsible for driving development work across a software development team. This position requires flexibility as we respond to new business and customer requirements, while being able to quickly adapt to new strategies and priorities as they evolve.
This position is open to internal and external candidates.
Product Line
This role will be working on the Runkeeper product.
Work Location
The successful candidate for this role can be either a satellite employee (working 100% remotely from a designated location within Canada) or a hybrid employee (flexibility to work in the office or from home at a location within 75 km from the London, ON).

Job Responsibilities

• Partner with senior team members to define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for an agile pod
• Collaborate with senior team members to define a vision and strategy for owned product area and tie it back to the larger product vision and strategy
• Collaborate with senior team members to structure and prioritize a high level roadmap for owned product area, ensuring it aligns to that vision
• Share both the vision and roadmap with an agile pod, and other team members as appropriate - proactively speaking to it, and ensuring buy-in and understanding across team members
• Partner with senior team members to target key product outcome(s)
• Prioritize opportunities and solutions based on their impact to those outcome(s)
• Understand how the product outcome(s) connects to broader business outcomes and ensure team members understand this, as well
• Leverage all of the above context to ship features that align to that strategy
• Effectively scope product and business problems related to an owned feature area, and and identify solutions for those problem
• Work with management to develop a plan for user discovery and research, independently executing on that plan, gather and share high level insights from that research, and use insights to drive decision making
• Use available tools to understand the quantitative performance of the product, and incorporate quantitative insights into decision making
• Leverage qualitative and quantitative data (using the techniques listed above) to refine a known user and/or business problem, and identify and scope a solution with the appropriate parties (e.g. engineering, design, localization)
• Proactively review feature designs with senior product and design team members to ensure they adhere to best practices
• Drive the delivery of new features and feature updates from ideation to completion across one or more product teams
• Independently gather requirements from appropriate parties (e.g. engineering, design, localization) and clearly define feature functionality and goals for an identified solution
• Working across engineering, design, localization, and other stakeholders to deliver that solution - iterating as necessary to ensure that what is ultimately shipped is high quality and achieves the goal for that feature
• Accurately estimating and communicating delivery timeline
• identifying and prioritizing issues that compromise product quality, while ensuring that critical feature delivery timelines are minimally impacted
• Communicate product strategy, plans, and learnings to management and across the org
• Use a variety of mediums (figma, word docs, excel, ppt) to provide updates to team members, managers, and the broader ASICS apps org
• Proactively construct updates for your manager so that your manager can understand and effectively advocate for their work, needs, roadmap changes, and growth
• Participate effectively in team and cross functional workshops. May be beginning to lead portions of these workshops with support from senior team members.
• Interface with stakeholders outside of the ASICS apps org as needed
• Monitor and report on performance of new feature launches against key user and business metrics related to that feature
• Develop artifacts required to justify the business case and plan for launching, updating, or deprecating a given feature and present these artifacts to stakeholders (to include senior executives) across ASICS
• Lead an Agile pod which means
• Maintain the product backlog with a prioritized list of clearly defined user stories that include both technical and analytics requirements
• Lead agile scrum ceremonies for team(s), ensuring that the priorities of the team and purpose of their work are clearly communicated during grooming, sprint planning and (when necessary) standups
• Be present in the team’s day to day operations to ensure that their questions are answered and blockers are removed
• Inspire commitment, high energy, and positive attitudes across the Runkeeper team
• Meaningfully participate in diversity and inclusion initiatives across the ASICS Apps teams

Education & Experience

• 2+ years of serving as a product manager (or in a related role) in a complex, cross-functional organization
• A demonstrated passion for health and fitness, tech, and working with big, cross-functional teams to get stuff done
• Basic familiarity with agile software development processes, as well as product development best practices
• The ability to develop relationships with and create effective, clear, concise, and relevant communication for stakeholders at all levels of the organization to generate buy in for product decisions
• The ability to think about strategic problems both qualitatively and quantitatively, generate and present options, and facilitate consensus and decision-making among stakeholders at all levels of the organization
• Excellent organizational skills, attention to detail and ability to work autonomously
• The ability to set priorities, manage multiple tasks and projects, and set, and meet, deadlines in a complex and fast-paced environment
• High degree of initiative and enthusiasm for quickly learning new concepts and working with new tools and sources of information
• Demonstrated commitment to health equity, antiracism, social justice causes, and community development.
• Comfort with ambiguity, and ability to adapt to change and remain upbeat under pressure

Bonus Education & Experience

• Relevant Industry Experience
• Experience working in a technology or fitness company, especially a startup
• Deep familiarity with the Runkeeper product and key competitors, as well as with ASICS’ strategic direction

Performance Measures

• Change in one or more metrics relevant to projects over which you have ownership
• Degree to which stakeholders (to include your teams and other ASICS teams) are aware of and aligned to your priorities and work
• Degree to which deadlines for feature delivery are met
• Efficient use of time and resources
• Continuously learning and improving in your role
• Quality of work performed

The successful candidate for this role will become an employee of Race Roster North America Corporation (doing business as ASICS Apps Canada), a subsidiary of ASICS Corporation, a Japanese multinational corporation. Race Roster was founded in London, Ontario in 2011.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, sex, place of origin, ethnic origin, ancestry, citizenship, creed, record of offences, genetics, disability, age, marital status, family status, veteran status, or fitness level.
Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process

• Partner with senior team members to define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for an agile pod
• Collaborate with senior team members to define a vision and strategy for owned product area and tie it back to the larger product vision and strategy
• Collaborate with senior team members to structure and prioritize a high level roadmap for owned product area, ensuring it aligns to that vision
• Share both the vision and roadmap with an agile pod, and other team members as appropriate - proactively speaking to it, and ensuring buy-in and understanding across team members
• Partner with senior team members to target key product outcome(s)
• Prioritize opportunities and solutions based on their impact to those outcome(s)
• Understand how the product outcome(s) connects to broader business outcomes and ensure team members understand this, as well
• Leverage all of the above context to ship features that align to that strategy
• Effectively scope product and business problems related to an owned feature area, and and identify solutions for those problem
• Work with management to develop a plan for user discovery and research, independently executing on that plan, gather and share high level insights from that research, and use insights to drive decision making
• Use available tools to understand the quantitative performance of the product, and incorporate quantitative insights into decision making
• Leverage qualitative and quantitative data (using the techniques listed above) to refine a known user and/or business problem, and identify and scope a solution with the appropriate parties (e.g. engineering, design, localization)
• Proactively review feature designs with senior product and design team members to ensure they adhere to best practices
• Drive the delivery of new features and feature updates from ideation to completion across one or more product teams
• Independently gather requirements from appropriate parties (e.g. engineering, design, localization) and clearly define feature functionality and goals for an identified solution
• Working across engineering, design, localization, and other stakeholders to deliver that solution - iterating as necessary to ensure that what is ultimately shipped is high quality and achieves the goal for that feature
• Accurately estimating and communicating delivery timeline
• identifying and prioritizing issues that compromise product quality, while ensuring that critical feature delivery timelines are minimally impacted
• Communicate product strategy, plans, and learnings to management and across the org
• Use a variety of mediums (figma, word docs, excel, ppt) to provide updates to team members, managers, and the broader ASICS apps org
• Proactively construct updates for your manager so that your manager can understand and effectively advocate for their work, needs, roadmap changes, and growth
• Participate effectively in team and cross functional workshops. May be beginning to lead portions of these workshops with support from senior team members.
• Interface with stakeholders outside of the ASICS apps org as needed
• Monitor and report on performance of new feature launches against key user and business metrics related to that feature
• Develop artifacts required to justify the business case and plan for launching, updating, or deprecating a given feature and present these artifacts to stakeholders (to include senior executives) across ASICS
• Lead an Agile pod which means
• Maintain the product backlog with a prioritized list of clearly defined user stories that include both technical and analytics requirements
• Lead agile scrum ceremonies for team(s), ensuring that the priorities of the team and purpose of their work are clearly communicated during grooming, sprint planning and (when necessary) standups
• Be present in the team’s day to day operations to ensure that their questions are answered and blockers are removed
• Inspire commitment, high energy, and positive attitudes across the Runkeeper team
• Meaningfully participate in diversity and inclusion initiatives across the ASICS Apps team