Agile Product Manager Senior Advisor, Individual Dental - Cigna Healthcare - Remote

Job description

Role Summary The Product Manager is accountable for ensuring that the product team solves meaningful customer problems in ways that deliver measurable business value. Rather than acting primarily as a project coordinator, requirements writer, or backlog administrator, the Product Manager leads through customer insight, product strategy, evidence-based decision-making, and close collaboration with design, engineering, data, operations, and business partners. The Product Manager works as part of a durable, cross-functional product team that is given important problems to solve - not predetermined features to deliver. The team is measured by customer and business outcomes rather than output, activity, or adherence to an original project plan. The Product Manager is accountable for product value and business viability, while partnering with design and engineering to address usability and feasibility. Together, the team discovers, delivers, measures, and continuously improves solutions that customers value and that work within the organization’s strategic, financial, operational, legal, regulatory, security, and technology constraints. The Product Manager also connects strategy and customer journeys across a broader product ecosystem, identifies opportunities for shared capabilities and reuse, and applies artificial intelligence to improve customer value, learning speed, decision quality, and product team efficiency What You Will Own Product Vision, Strategy, and Outcomes • Develop and communicate a compelling product vision aligned with enterprise strategy, customer needs, and measurable business objectives. • Translate strategic priorities into clearly defined customer or business problems for the product team to solve. • Establish outcome-based product goals, success measures, guardrails, and leading indicators. • Maintain an outcome-oriented roadmap that communicates strategic intent, learning priorities, and anticipated customer or business impact - not merely a schedule of features. • Make evidence-based product decisions using customer insights, product analytics, operational data, market information, and business performance. • Evaluate progress against outcomes and recommend whether to continue, adjust, scale, or stop an investment. • Balance near-term opportunities with long-term product health, scalability, sustainability, and strategic differentiation. Customer and Market Understanding • Develop deep knowledge of customers, users, buyers, stakeholders, and the environments in which they use the product. • Conduct and participate in customer interviews, observation, usability testing, journey analysis, and other forms of qualitative research. • Use quantitative data to understand customer behavior, adoption, performance, unmet needs, and friction points. • Monitor relevant market developments, industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitive alternatives. • Clearly articulate the customer problem, its significance, the affected customer segments, and the expected impact of solving it. • Maintain regular customer contact so decisions are grounded in evidence rather than assumptions or stakeholder preference. Continuous Product Discovery • Lead continuous discovery in close partnership with product design and engineering. • Frame opportunities as testable product hypotheses. • Explore multiple solution approaches before committing significant delivery capacity. • Identify and evaluate the primary product risks: value, viability, usability, and feasibility. • Use prototypes, experiments, technical spikes, customer testing, analytics, and other appropriate techniques to test assumptions early. • Synthesize discovery evidence and make clear recommendations about which opportunities and solutions should advance. • Ensure ideas are validated sufficiently before the organization makes material delivery investments. Product Delivery and Lifecycle Ownership • Partner with engineering, design, Product Owners, architecture, data, operations, and other contributors to translate validated opportunities into incremental product releases. • Provide strategic context and timely product decisions without prescribing how specialists should perform their work. • Prioritize opportunities and product investments based on expected outcomes, customer impact, evidence, risk, effort, and strategic alignment. • Make informed trade-offs involving scope, timing, quality, customer experience, operational readiness, and business value. • Maintain alignment between the product strategy, roadmap, discovery pipeline, and delivery backlog. • Enable frequent delivery of small increments so the team can gather customer feedback, measure results, and adapt quickly. • Participate actively in planning, reviews, demonstrations, and other team activities where product context or decisions are needed. • Remain accountable after launch by monitoring adoption, customer behavior, reliability, operational performance, and business results. • Partner with the team to resolve production issues, improve product health, address technical debt, and optimize the product throughout its lifecycle. Business Viability and Enterprise Partnership • Understand the organization’s business model, strategic objectives, financial considerations, operating processes, customer commitments, and regulatory environment. • Identify constraints involving compliance, privacy, legal, security, finance, sales, service, operations, and other enterprise functions. • Engage these partners early enough to inform discovery rather than treating them only as downstream approvers. • Build alignment through customer evidence, data, options, transparent trade-offs, and clearly stated product outcomes. • Influence senior leaders and stakeholders without becoming an order-taker for individual feature requests. • Communicate product strategy, decisions, risks, learning, progress, and results in language appropriate for executive, business, technical, and opera