Job Title: Manager, Product Development
Company: Spectrum Reach (subsidiary of Charter Communications, LLC)
Industry: Advertising/Advertising Technology (Ad-Tech)
Select one career level: Manager
Can you explain what type of education and background experience someone may need to work in your job?
Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, etc.
Background in application product development is preferred. Coding experience is not needed, but must be able to help build a vision, collaborate cross-functionality, maintain project/product roadmaps, define & write consumable user stories.
Describe your day-to-day duties.
I manage a 5-person team, consisting of 2 Business Analysts and 3 Application Support Analysts who are dedicated to serving the Sales department of Spectrum Reach. The Business Analysts’ main daily duties are to facilitate planning/prioritization of development work, define features, write requirements/user stories and partner with UI/UX, and development, teams to create features within the applications. The Support Analysts provide technical and functional support for the end users of 7 sales facing applications. In my role, I leverage my experience as a Business Analyst and a Support Analyst to implement standards of requirements gathering and customer support, as well as driving personal development of my team.
Please write your 3 favorite parts about your job in bullet point form.
People Leadership - Investing time and energy into people, and then watching them learn and grow in their role and their knowledge of our company is my absolute favorite part of the role.
The Advertising industry is fast-paced, and technically complex. I am consistently learning and applying those learnings to my day-to-day activities on the job.
Being in Television and Digital advertising allows me to work closely on projects that are directly inline with my hobbies outside of work (sports, TV shows, movies, pop culture, etc.)
Who are some teams that you collaborate/work with?
Sales, Sales Support, Marketing, Finance, Pricing & Planning, IT/Data
What are some of the challenges that you face within your role?
Recent challenges has been with retaining top talent. The job market is competitive right now, and it’s vital that we find, hire and retain top talent for our team and company. Most people that are hired do not have experience in the Cable or Digital advertising space, which makes ramp up time longer to understand the industry as a whole
In our fast-paced industry, there is constant change in direction and priority for our Sales teams. Being agile, and having the ability to quickly pivot and change thought process can be difficult and often time’s surfaces knowledge/expertise gaps on the team.
What is one thing you wish more people knew about your job?
Working on a Product Development team in a technology/data driven organization is about formulating ideas and plans for new projects, systems and workflows to help the Sales organization remain competitive in the marketplace, it is not about being able to write code. We partner closely with Sales to understand problems they face with the current suite of products, and identify solutions to improve the Sales team’s ability to garner relationships and build business with new/existing clients. Once problems/solutions are identified, we work with vendors, internal UX/UI teams and internal/external development partners to implement these solutions into our suite of products. Product team members must understand the Sales process, the products in which they are selling, and identify opportunities to improve the Products and Sales workflow. But also must act as an in-between with development (Data, Software, IT) teams to define the business and functional requirements so that these teams can implement the solutions into the suite of products.
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