Product Manager (Mat Leave Coverage)

Univeris Corporation; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking an experienced Product Manager to lead transformative initiatives in the wealth management sector. This role involves bridging business and product development, ensuring successful product launches, and maintaining a robust backlog. The ideal candidate will possess extensive experience in Agile environments, particularly within the financial services industry. Join a dynamic team in a hybrid work environment located in downtown Toronto, where your leadership and communication skills will drive product success and innovation.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Manager in Agile environments.
• Expert understanding of Agile principles and Scrum methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain a Product Roadmap aligned with corporate objectives.
• Plan and execute product launch strategies in collaboration with stakeholders.

Skills

Agile Product Management

Leadership

Communication

Organization

Wealth Management Industry Knowledge

Scrum

Coaching Product Managers

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

The Company

Univeris, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, is a privately held company and is the leader in enterprise wealth management for the Canadian market. Founded in 1991, Univeris has over 150 staff and 25 leading financial services clients representing over 12,000 financial advisors on the platform. It offers the most comprehensive wealth management solution for financial advisors in the credit union, banking, insurance and investment dealer sectors.

Univeris is a world-class technology platform that boasts a number of firsts in Canadian mutual fund distribution, including real-time processing, web access, built-in compliance, plus GIC and segregated funds processing capabilities. Technology innovation is one of the cornerstones of Univeris' product development strategy, and through its Evergreen approach to technology, new features and capabilities transparently integrate into the platform

The Opportunity

Univeris is embarking on a multi-year program of initiatives to transform our products and business to position us for growth in the Canadian wealth management industry driven by the new regulator CIRO. To ensure this transformation program's success, we seek an experiencedsoftware Product Manager to deliver new and enhanced products to market.Product Managers at Univeris bridge the gap between the business and product development to realize our corporate objectives. The role has significant interactions outside the product development team, including customers, marketing, internal stakeholders, product designers, software engineers and architects.This is a 1 year-contractor role for individuals who have there own registered company with CRA.

The Role

The Product Manager is associated with one or more cross-functional product teams and fulfills the primary accountabilities outlined below for all assigned products.

• Developing and maintaining a Product Roadmap in collaboration with product leadershipto realize the goals of the product's vision and corporate objectives.
• Preparing product and business requirements documents to support product development initiatives.
• Defining and communicating relevant product requirements in collaboration with customers, business analysts and other stakeholders.
• Maintaining and prioritizing a sufficient backlog of ready-to-work backlog items to facilitate sprint planning, such as epics, user stories and tasks.
• Accepting user stories as being completed based on their established acceptance criteria and the definition of done.The Product Manager also fulfills a critical quality assurance function, focusing primarily on fitness for use.
• Planning and executing the launch strategy for each product release in collaboration with key stakeholders to ensure all teams are enabled.

The Product Manager fulfills the following responsibilities for all assigned products and product capabilities:

• Proactively participate in release and product increment planning.
• Leading the product team members in writing stories, with accountability for maintaining a healthy backlog of stories.
• Ensuring user stories are "ready" for development to start work according to an established "definition of ready" in collaboration with the Product Team.
• Ensuring each user story has the necessary Acceptance Criteria defined in collaboration with the product team.
• Coordinating dependencies and activities with the entire Product Team as necessary to support "team-of-teams" initiatives.
• Sharing market information and business insights with the Product Team to give context to the requirements to help ensure that the team is solving the correct problems.
• Continuously developing relevant product domain expertise and sharing that expertise with the product team.
• Tracking progress toward program increment and release objectives and communicating to the organization.
• Defining new user personas as necessary in conjunction with the product team and user experience experts.
• Leading program increment planning activities for the product team.
• Participating in all Agile ceremonies with the product team, including daily standups, sprint planning,backlog refinement, demos and retrospectives.
• Collaborating with Scrum Masters to practice agility and capitalize on Scrum to maximize the product value and ensure continuous improvement.
• Presenting the work summary forthe product team in sprint reviews and inviting appropriate stakeholders to give feedback.
• Contributing to and reviewing product releasedocumentation, including user and technical guides.
• Assisting Product Marketing with creating product collateral, presentations and thought leadership articles.
• Continuously building and maintaining productive relationships with customers.

The Successful Candidate: Your Formal Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in the wealth management industry (ideally) or financial services.
• 5+ years of industry experience as a Product Manager in an Agile software development environment.
• Expert level understanding of Agile product management principles with Scrum.
• Working knowledge of the Atlassian suite (Jira & Confluence) or similar tools.
• Experience coaching and developing less experienced Product Managers.

Your Proven Qualities

• Leadership - proven ability to lead a high-performance team and deliver in a fast-paced and dynamic environment.
• Communication - able to clearly and concisely communicate in verbal and written form to both internal and customer stakeholders, with emphasis on understanding the customer's perspective.
• Organization - consistent and structured in managing information, documentation, agile boards and other artifacts produced.
• Learning agility - ability to quickly learn new business and technical concepts and apply them in delivering value.

Extras You Might Offer As Tiebreakers

• Experience working for an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) delivering B2B software products.
• Experience with regulatory organizations and frameworks, such as IIROC or the MFDA (CIRO).
• Proven ability to take on the leadership of large-scale enterprise software products and quickly develop expertise in that domain.
• Pragmatic Marketing, CSPO or similar Product Management certifications.
• Experience trading stocks or making personal investment decisions.

The Work Environment

Our location is downtown Toronto in a small office environment.

Work is hybrid, collaborating with other team members in-person and digitally during regular business hours.

Some work outside of normal business hours may be required on occasion due to time-constrained activities or collaborating with remote teams.

At Univeris, we embrace diversity and inclusion. We welcome applications from qualified individuals from all backgrounds.

Persons with disabilities who need accommodation in the application process may e-mail a request [e-mail].

We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.