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 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 customer 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 Infrastructure related product teams to serve the needs of Pekin’s employees, agents, and insurance customers. The Technology Manager will work with their teams and business partners to develop a execute a roadmap to streamline, modernize and advance their product team(s) capabilities. The specific product team(s) you will lead is to be determined and may depend on the skills and experiences of the individual selected.

The ideal candidate will be familiar with middleware/integrations technologies, specifically WSO2

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

• Works with designers and developers to build an understanding of customer needs, develop a product roadmap and feature requirements, and execute on that roadmap

• 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

• Implements and hold teams accountable to functional policies, procedures, enterprise security, IT risk & compliance, and quality assurance best practices

• Reviews 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

• Manages communications and working relationships between IT and other departments within the organization as well as multiple outside IT service providers

• Performs other duties as assigned

Education & Experience

• 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.

• Agile and Product Management Experience

• Guidewire and Insurance experience preferred

• DevOps experience preferred Experience in an agile environment strongly preferred

Certifications & Licenses

• N/A

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

Demonstrated knowledge of:

• Understands techniques and methods of modern product discovery and product delivery

• Multiple functional areas of business – engineering, design, finance, sales, or marketing

• Has or develops a deep knowledge of the customer and their needs

• Agile and product management methodologies

• Domains of any core technologies that the product requires to deliver capabilities
  
  

Demonstrated ability to:

• Displays a strong passion and enthusiasm for the success of the product and team

• Partners and collaborates across the organization to optimize outcomes

• Assesses solutions for current and future needs

• Works across multiple groups within IT to ensure end-to-end performance

• Adapts and embraces change needed to deliver value to the customer

• Accountability for product by taking ownership and willingness to do what it takes to deliver on product requirements

• Engages stakeholders to support important business decisions

• Translates technical language into meaningful, outcome-centric language for customers

• Works with business areas to understand needs/requirements with an ability provide innovative solutions

• Presents to all levels of management & executive leadership

• Empowers employees by promoting trust between team members and stakeholders needed to deliver business outcomes

• Manages 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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