Technical Product Manager

Technical Product Manager (Full-time)
Position Overview

Gps-based technology company is seeking a Product Manager, with limited Support Tasks.

This position is for a Technical Product Manager with operational ownership of the customer-support process. The individual is not necessarily expected to personally resolve every technical issue. Rather, the role is accountable for ensuring that every customer issue has the right owner, the right priority, appropriate progress, and clear communication back to the customer.

The Product Manager is responsible for defining, managing, and continuously improving our products, data services, APIs, and user-interface development tools.

The role serves as a bridge between customers, business stakeholders, software development, engineering, and technical support. The primary responsibility is product ownership, including understanding customer and business needs, defining requirements, managing the product roadmap, and translating requirements into actionable development work.

As a secondary responsibility, the role manages the customer support process, reviewing and understanding customer support requests, prioritization and assignment to the appropriate technical resources, tracked through resolution, and communicated back to the customer in a timely and professional manner.

The position requires a combination of product-management, technical-analysis, customer-management, and operational skills.

Primary Role: Product ManagerProduct Strategy & Roadmap

• Define, maintain and communicate the product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
• Identify new product opportunities based on customer needs, business objectives, market trends, and emerging technologies.
• Prioritize product enhancements, new features, integrations, and technical investments.
• Balance customer requests with strategic product priorities and development capacity.
• Maintain and prioritize the product backlog.

Requirements & Product Definition

• Gather requirements from customers, sales, support, engineering, and internal stakeholders.
• Understand the underlying business problem behind a requested feature or enhancement.
• Translate business problems and customer requests into clear functional and technical requirements.
• Define product features, workflows, business rules, acceptance criteria, and expected outcomes.
• Break complex requirements into epics, features, and development stories.
• Identify dependencies, assumptions, risks, and edge cases.
• Ensure development teams have sufficient information to begin work effectively.
• Serve as the primary point of clarification for requirements during development.

API & Integration Management

• Maintain a strong understanding of company APIs, data services, and integration capabilities.
• Define requirements for external API integrations.
• Work with development teams to define API inputs, outputs, authentication, data formats, error handling, and business rules.
• Work with third-party systems and data providers to understand integration requirements.
• Document integration workflows and dependencies.
• Identify opportunities to improve the usability, reliability, and capabilities of APIs and data services.

UI / Application Development Tools

• Working with UI prototyping tools to define requirements for UI components, dashboards, forms, maps, charts, tables, reports, alerts, and other application capabilities.

Reporting & Analytics

• Gather and define reporting and analytics requirements.
• Translate reporting needs into data requirements and development stories.
• Define report layouts, filters, parameters, calculations, aggregations, and export requirements.
• Work with database and development teams to ensure reporting requirements can be supported by available data.
• Identify opportunities for dashboards, analytics, KPIs, and operational reporting.

Customer & Stakeholder Management

• Act as a primary product contact for key customers and internal stakeholders.
• Understand customer objectives, business processes, and pain points.
• Communicate product decisions, priorities, timelines, and tradeoffs.
• Manage expectations regarding requested features and enhancements.
• Convert customer feedback into actionable product improvements.
• Coordinate communication between customers and internal technical teams.

Agile Development & Delivery

• Work closely with development, QA, UX/UI, and project teams throughout the development lifecycle.
• Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, demos, and retrospectives.
• Clarify requirements and answer questions throughout development.
• Review completed features against acceptance criteria and assist QA in defining appropriate test scenarios.
• Coordinate user acceptance testing where appropriate.
• Assist with product releases and post-release evaluation.

Secondary Role: Manage Support RequestsSupport Request Management

• Serve as the operational owner of the customer support request process.
• Review incoming support requests and determine the appropriate level of attention and urgency.
• Evaluate the nature of each request to determine if it is a support issue, a training issue, a defect or a feature request.
• Ensure requests contain sufficient information for the assigned resource to investigate effectively.
• Identify duplicate, related, or recurring support issues.
• Establish appropriate priority and escalation levels.

Support Assignment & Resource Management

• Assign support requests to the appropriate internal resource based on technical expertise, product knowledge, workload, and issue complexity.
• Ensure support requests are routed to the correct development, engineering, database, implementation, or support resource.
• Monitor resource workload and identify potential bottlenecks.
• Escalate issues when additional expertise or management involvement is required.
• Ensure ownership of each support request is clearly established.

Support Tracking & Accountability

• Monitor open support requests through completion.
• Track status, progress, blockers, dependencies, and expected resolution dates.
• Follow up with assigned resources when requests are not progressing appropriately.
• Identify overdue or stalled requests and initiate escalation as necessary.
• Ensure appropriate documentation of troubleshooting, findings, actions, and resolutions.
• Maintain visibility into the overall support workload and outstanding customer issues.

Customer Communication

• Serve as a communication point between customers and internal technical resources when appropriate.
• Provide customers with timely updates regarding the status of their requests.
• Communicate expected timelines, delays, dependencies, and resolution information.
• Translate technical information into clear, customer-friendly communication.
• Ensure customers understand what actions are being taken and what information may be required from them.
• Confirm that customer questions or issues have been adequately addressed before closing requests.

Support Escalation

• Identify and escalate issues requiring immediate engineering, development, management, or customer attention.
• Ensure critical issues receive appropriate visibility and follow-through.
• Communicate significant incidents and status updates to affected stakeholders.

Support Reporting & Metrics

• Monitor and report on support metrics such as:
• Open support requests, by priority
• Average response time and resolution time
• Aging support requests
• Escalated requests
• Defects and enhancements identified through support

Product Feedback Loop

A key responsibility of the combined role is to ensure that customer support becomes a source of product intelligence.

• Identify recurring support issues or trends that indicate product deficiencies or usability problems.
• Identify frequently requested enhancements and capabilities.
• Communicate significant customer pain points to Product Management and Engineering.
• Use customer support trends to influence product priorities and roadmap decisions.
• Identify opportunities to improve documentation, training, configuration, or process improvements..

Core Skills & Competencies

• Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Requirements gathering and analysis
• Product backlog management
• User-story and acceptance-criteria development
• Ability to communicate effectively with with engineering teams to understand technical limitations and opportunities within the data platform
• Learn and use of the following web-based tools for management of daily work tasks and communication:
• Slack
• Jira
• Postman (used to make API calls to our system)
• Understanding of REST APIs and web services
• Understanding of databases and data structures
• Familiarity with SQL, JSON, XML, and other common data formats
• Understanding of system integrations and data flows
• Ability to troubleshoot issues sufficiently to determine the appropriate technical resource or escalation path
• Understand GPS data elements including latitude/longitude, speed, heading, altitude, timestamps, distance, trip information, and vehicle/device status.
• Understand the flow of GPS data from devices through communications networks, ingestion services, databases, APIs, and applications.
• Understand vehicle tracking, fleet data, telematics, mapping, geofencing, routing, and location-based services.

Business & Leadership

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Strong written and verbal communication
• Customer-focused mindset
• Strong organizational skills
• Ability to manage competing priorities
• Ability to work effectively across technical and non-technical teams
• Ability to influence without direct authority
• Ability to make informed prioritization and resource-allocation decisions
• Strong follow-through and accountability

Key Success Measures

Success in this role can be measured by the ability to:

• Deliver clearly defined and actionable product requirements.
• Maintain an effective and prioritized product roadmap.
• Improve the quality and usability of the company's GPS/data and application-development products.
• Ensure customer requests are quickly understood and routed to the appropriate resource.
• Reduce the number of improperly assigned or stalled support requests.
• Improve visibility into the status of customer issues.
• Provide customers with timely and accurate communication.
• Identify recurring support problems and turn them into product improvements.
• Improve coordination between customers, Support, Product, Engineering, Development, and QA.
• Ensure important customer issues receive appropriate ownership and follow-through.
• Use customer and support data to inform product priorities.
• Increase the efficiency and consistency of both product-development and support processes.

Work Schedule & Environment

• Approximately 40 hours per week, some flexibility in work hours (typically weekdays between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm)
• This position is in office Tu-Th in our downtown Kelowna office, with the option of remote on Mon & Fri..

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $70,000.00-$90,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Dental care
• Extended health care
• Paid time off

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Kelowna, BC V1Y 2E1