Product Manager - Agilysys, Inc.

Agilysys provides enterprise software, services, and solutions for the hospitality industry in North America, Europe, and Asia.  Products include points-of-sale, property management, inventory and procurement, analytics solutions, and mobile and wireless solutions that are designed to improve efficiency and enhance the guest experience.  We serve casinos, resorts, hotels, and foodservice venues.

Job Summary:

The ideal candidate has shipped commercial enterprise software to the delight of customers worldwide. You love driving an aggressive but realistic vision. You back your ideas with industry insight, customer need and company strategy. Leveraging your technical skills and product understanding, you love working closely with customers to develop comprehensive solutions. You are data-driven, using multiple sources to help inform your opinions. You agonize over the product experience, wanting to make it as easy to use as possible. You’ve worked in a fast-paced environment and love to work collaboratively across product, engineering, QA and other disciplines to deliver high quality solutions. You are open-minded able to collate feedback from multiple sources to inform and adjust your vision.

Roles and Responsibilities: 

• Partner with Product Management on developing product roadmap aligned with strategic objectives and customer commitments 
• Plan and execute delivery of the product roadmap based on an objectively prioritized backlog of user stories 
• Engage directly with clients and internal stakeholders to develop a deep understanding of our customers hospitality operations, their business objectives and pain points 
• Decompose complex business problems into clearly articulated business and functional requirements 
• Articulate requirements clearly to the engineering, quality assurance, user experience and other teams members and regularly refine for clarity 
• Collaborate with engineering and QA to scope, provide product effort estimates and timeline guidance 
• Continuously refine requirements through the SDLC by factoring in new developments, requirements and risks. Make key product decisions that affect your roadmap and communicate these effectively 
• Engage consultatively with client teams to provide subject matter guidance, collaborate on design workshops, and provide regular updates to project deliverables  
• Provide Subject Matter guidance on hotel business processes within a cross-functional engineering team  
• Perform additional research on business requirements where required – sourcing information from internal and external stakeholders  
• Collaborate with user experience team members, senior customer team members and internal stakeholders to design business workflows that naturally facilitate business operations 
• Help build and continually reinforce a team culture that focuses on hospitality customer and guest experiences and delivers solutions that that excel towards efficiency 
• Continuously assess team performance and risks to roadmap deliverables and collaborate across stakeholders to remove any impediments (including with customers) 
• Continuously refine product backlog based on development updates and changes to roadmap or strategic priorities 
• Communicate risks, changes and trade-offs as they occur and provide updates to roadmap deliverables and timelines 
• Continuously assess user qualitative and quantitative user feedback and incorporate regular improvements into the backlog to ensure existing features are refined into experiences that delight 
• Product expert product-level guidance to internal stakeholders in sales and support as required; particularly for feature areas under your purview 
• Collaborate with 3rd party partners where required to understand their solutions in depth and design features that can interplay with partner systems seamlessly to facilitate client business objectives 
• Perform review and acceptance testing and/or approval of the features/changes being developed/tested by engineering 
• Effective engagement with customers to plan and execute UAT; act as a source of engineering test guidance based on customer UAT experiences and feedback

Ideal Candidate Requirements:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Hospitality, Business Management, or other related experience in Hospitality Operations and Technology 
• Minimum Work Experience: 
  • 3 - 5 years hospitality related experience 
  • 3+ years product owner, project management or other technology related experience 
• Deep understanding of hospitality industry, in one or more of the following areas: 
  • Front Office Operations 
  • Rate and Revenue Management (including distributions) 
  • Central Reservations 
  • Accounting and Finance 
  • Marketing and Sales 
  • Groups and Event Management 
  • Housekeeping 
  • Integrations and Systems Support 
• Deep understanding one or more hospitality management systems, including: 
  • Property Management (PMS) 
  • Central Reservations / Distributions (CRS) 
  • Sales & Catering 
  • Finance, Housekeeping and other related systems 
• Technical experience with hotel systems and integrations is an asset 
• Excellent communication skills, with ability to: 
  • Articulate business requirements, ideas and concepts to senior level stakeholders in both written and verbal formats 
  • Speak confidently to seasoned Director-level hospitality stakeholders and lead workshops in a consultative format in which they are a subject matter expert 
  • Translate business-level requirements to technical stakeholders in engineering, quality assurance and other related roles 
  • Collaborate across roles to facilitate design and delivery of new business features 
• Experience working in a multi-role team scenario (such as Agile); preferably with direct responsibility on team requirements, roadmap or general direction 
• Proven track records in delivering projects through to successful conclusion on-time and with high quality 
• Demonstrated sense of drive and confidence to lead teams through a plan of action