Location: Hybrid Work Model - Van Wert or Columbus, Ohio
Do you have an entrepreneurial spirit, an intrinsic desire to ask why, and the grit to create something new? If so, Central Insurance might be the right place for you. We're an established insurance provider that believes technology and great customer experience are the keys to future growth.
In this role as Director, Digital Product Management, you'll lead our digital product team. This group of Product Managers and Product Owners is responsible for our Policy Admin, Rating, Insurance Product Design, Claims, Billing, Finance, Agent Experience, Policyholder Experience, and Shared Foundation solutions. You’ll serve as their coach and mentor.
You will also work closely with insurance product management, business stakeholders, design, research, and engineering to develop a portfolio level vision and deliver modernized solutions. This is a relatively new team within the organization, so this leader will need to have an entrepreneurial mindset and battle tested experience to deal with ambiguity and set a path for others to follow.
How You’ll Make an Impact
Strategy & Planning

• Own the digital strategy for all value chain software. Develop long-term digital roadmap and ensure individual product roadmaps ladder up to your vision.
• Help your team evaluate value and viability of initiatives and make prioritization decisions across the digital portfolio. Know when to challenge dangerous assumptions and identify ways to de-risk initiatives.
• Collaborate with the insurance product team to build one roadmap that addresses digital and insurance products. Ensure insurance business cases and execution plans address digital gaps.
• Drive your team to assess alternative ways to solve technical challenges. Ensure they properly assesses build, buy, and partner options and build objective long-term business cases. Own the final recommendation.
• Coach your team on how to set realistic roadmap expectations.

Research

• Build a team culture that strives to actively understand users, business operations, and company goals, and uses that knowledge to identify opportunities and unmet needs that help achieve company goals.
• Identify knowledge gaps and assumptions your team is making about users and coach them on how to recognize and assess their impact.
• Prioritize research requests based on risk, cost to research, and ability to act on findings.
• Ensure your team is researching technical capabilities of our competitors, industry level technical trends, and off-the-shelf solutions.

Delivery

• Review all digital product initiatives to remediate potential cross-portfolio dependencies or conflicts.
• Diagnose major or consistent sizing misses and remediate. Help team identify ways to achieve the same intended outcomes with reduced scope, partners, 3rd party vendors, etc.
• Diagnose major or consistent issues with development planning and work with engineering leadership to remediate.
• Ensure team is constantly identifying and testing opportunities. Celebrate failed tests and force the team to pivot to new ideas quickly.

Performance Management

• Track product outcomes. Celebrate successes and create actions plans for misses in a way that drives continuous improvement, not blame.
• Consolidate and share product development costs. Surface cost over runs.
• Set and track reasonable quality targets for all release deliverables.
• Ensure digital product and engineering teams understand how their work contributions to company goals and financial performance.

Communication & Collaboration

• Maintain strong relationships with department heads to ensure high-level priority alignment. Create clear and concise executive level updates on roadmap and performance.
• Ensure digital products have a clear value prop and it is being promoted to agents, policyholders, and employees.
• Ensure your team delivers clear and comprehensive communications that align internal teams and drive product adoption.
• Manage expectations on enhancement and defect responsiveness within your team and across the organization and manage your team to meet those expectations.

What You’ll Bring

• Master’s degree in business management and 5 years of related experience including 3 years of management experience
• Or bachelor’s degree in business management and 6 years related experience including 3 years of management experience
• Or 8 years related experience including 3 years of management experience
• Strategic mindset to develop long-term product vision
• Strong business acumen with the ability to build and evaluate business cases
• Concise and impactful communication skills and executive presence
• Strong foresight to identify ill-defined requirements, capacity constraints, risks, dependencies, and assumptions
• Strong organizational and leadership skills, including coaching and team development
• Continuous improvement mindset with the ability to reflect on past team experiences and identify and execute future improvements
• Outcome oriented with the ability to track and communicate performance

Preferred

• 2 years of insurance industry experience
• Prior experience working on large scale software modernization projects

It is the policy of Central that all recruiting, hiring, training, compensation, overtime, job classification and assignment, facilities, promotions, transfers, employee treatment and all other terms and conditions of employment shall be maintained in a manner which will not discriminate against any person because of race, color, age, sex, national origin, ancestry, religion, marital status, military status, or disability. The applicant should respond to questions on this application in a way that will not divulge such information. #LI-Hybrid