You spend at least a third of your day at your job. You might as well spend it doing something you really love while working with a team you really enjoy being with, right? That’s the kind of atmosphere we offer at Pekin Insurance—fun, fast-paced, gratifying, supportive, and collaborative.

Of course, it’s not all fun and games. Insurance is a serious business, and we pride ourselves on making people’s lives whole again after a major disaster or even a fender bender. It’s that sense of helping people that makes our team want to do our best every day.

If you want to be excited about starting your workday and are ready to make a real difference in people’s lives, this could be the right spot for you.

See what Pekin Insurance has to offer by viewing a short video here.

Position Overview

The Technology Manager works with business and IT to solve customer and business problems using technology. The Technology Manager will partner closely with the business to set the vision and prioritize product functionality and enhancements. The Technology Manager will also lead and empower product team members to design the best solutions with the user experience in mind. Technology Managers need to be able to influence and hold the team accountable, as well as colleagues, stakeholders, and key executives, using data and logic.

This specific opportunity is to oversee the Agent and Customer Digital Experience product teams, responsible for the product roadmap, delivery, and production support of our flagship portals: Agent Portal for independent agents and MyPI portal for insureds. The manager will lead the strategic direction of Pekin’s user journeys as it relates to service capabilities for those who sell our insurance products, as well as self-service capabilities on pekininsurance.com for our policyholders.

The Technology Manager will apply proven communication skills, problem-solving skills, and knowledge of best practices to guide their teams on issues related to mission-critical information and software systems.

Essential Job Functions

• Responsibilities will include leading industry, market, and customer research, building product strategy and roadmap, acting as a change leader and championing change initiatives, establishing fast feedback loops to learn and accelerate outcomes, aligning and communicating with stakeholders, establish time schedules with engineering, and facilitating cross-team collaboration
• Work with designers and developers to build an understanding of end-user needs, develop a product roadmap and feature requirements, and execute on that roadmap. You should be well-versed in the product development cycle from ideation all the way through exploration, execution, and impact
• Partners with Business leaders to drive product vision, strategy, and prioritization of work
• Holds teams accountable for delivering results in alignment with department and business strategy. Coaches team members on a continuous basis, documents performance evaluations, and performs management duties of staff.
• Implement and hold teams accountable to functional policies, procedures, enterprise security, IT risk & compliance, and quality assurance best practices
• Review and analyze existing applications and system effectiveness and then develop and present strategies for leveraging or improving these systems
• Responsible for preparing, establishing, and monitoring budgets
• Partners with business groups, product teams, and other internal teams in their area of responsibility, and external service providers to establish and manage service level agreements (SLAs) that support business objectives
• Partners with Vendor Managers to provide recommendations throughout the vendor negotiations and contract development processes and reviews and reports on vendor performance
• Executes appropriate communication, process, and educational plans for mitigating the disruption of change
• Manage communications and working relationships between IT and other departments within the organization as well as multiple outside IT service providers

Education & Experience

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
• At least 3-5 years of direct or indirect leadership experience
• 2 years working on technology-powered products as either a technology manager, product manager, product owner, engineer, data analyst, data scientist or relative business experience.

Preferred:

• Agile and Product Management Experience

• Guidewire and Insurance experience preferred

• DevOps experience preferred

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

Demonstrated knowledge of:

• Understanding of the techniques and methods of modern product discovery and product delivery
• Multiple functional areas of business – engineering, design, finance, sales, or marketing
• Have or develop a deep knowledge of the customer and their needs
• Agile and product management methodologies
• The domains of any core technologies that the product requires to deliver capabilities
  
  

Demonstrated ability to:

• Display a strong passion and enthusiasm for the success of the product and team
• Partner and collaborate across the organization to optimize outcomes
• Assess solutions for current and future needs
• Work across multiple groups within IT to ensure end-to-end performance
• Be adaptable and embrace change needed to deliver value to the customer
• Be accountable for your product by taking ownership and having a willingness to do what it takes to deliver on product requirements
• Engage stakeholders to support important business decisions
• Translate technical language into meaningful, outcome-centric language for customers
• Work with business areas to understand needs/requirements with an ability provide innovative solutions
• Present to all levels of management & executive leadership
• Empower employees by promoting trust between team members and stakeholders needed to deliver business outcomes
• Manage a team of IT professionals including coaching, development, and performance evaluations
• Maintains professional and technical knowledge by attending educational workshops, reviewing professional publications and content, and participating in professional societies

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