[Hiring] Staff/Principal Product Manager @Skylight

Role Description

At Skylight, product managers are responsible for strategy, planning, execution, stakeholder management, and team health. Product managers partner with researchers, designers, engineers, client stakeholders, and others to inform their product decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to figure out what to build next and why.

In this role, you'll hit the ground running in a fast-moving, cross-functional environment — coordinating immediately with researchers, designers, engineers, and government stakeholders to deliver against an ambitious vision from day one. This role sits at the intersection of product strategy, change management, enablement, and service delivery, and demands someone who can orient quickly, build trust across teams, and ensure new digital capabilities are not only built, but understood, usable, and sustained.

What you’ll do

• Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts to build and ship high-impact products and services.
• Translate needs from users and government partners into a product strategy, including vision, objectives, measures of success, product roadmap, and product backlog.
• Manage the direction, scope, and priorities of the product initiative, building from user research to minimum viable products to scalable solutions.
• Write user stories, prioritize stories, and build release plans.
• Facilitate team ceremonies such as planning meetings, stakeholder syncs, and retrospectives.
• Draw on data and feedback to inform the product strategy and roadmap.
• Work in close partnership with government teams to transfer digital skills and product knowledge throughout the course of the project.
• Creatively navigate bureaucratic challenges, paving the way for more intuitive processes in the future.
• Collaborate with government partners to ensure compatibility with existing processes and technologies.

Qualifications

• Has demonstrated experience leading product development from concept through launch for net-new digital tools, navigating ambiguity, defining scope, and building alignment across cross-functional stakeholders in resource-constrained environments.
• Experience with participatory research processes that centered people with lived experience as active collaborators in product definition, ensuring solutions reflected the real needs and priorities of the communities served.
• Understand lean product principles and how to apply them (e.g., minimum viable product) at various stages of the product life cycle in order to mitigate risk, validate assumptions, and amplify learning.
• Can develop a product strategy that is informed by an understanding of the problem to be solved, prioritizes outcomes over feature sets, and establishes the direction of the product over time (e.g., product roadmap), including success criteria.
• Ability to execute the product strategy by breaking down the product’s scope into usable chunks of value that can be realized sooner rather than later, creating and maintaining a prioritized backlog with validated user stories, and facilitating team ceremonies over the course of the product’s iterations.
• Understand how to engage in the process of human-centered design in order to better inform product direction.
• Ability to collaborate with folks outside of your discipline, such as researchers, designers, engineers, and others, in order to get things done.
• Ability to manage clients and stakeholders in a way that builds trust, alignment, and healthy environments for individuals and teams.
• Understand the merits of different software development methodologies (e.g., agile, lean) and how to put them into practice.
• Commitment to equipping federal teams with documentation, training, and mentoring so improvements last beyond the contract.
• Ability to work effectively in a professional services environment.
• Passion for improving public outcomes through great government services.
• A mindset and work approach that align with Skylight’s core values.

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Background in driving user adoption and enablement, including training, change management, or service design.
• Demonstrated ability to support large, distributed, or operational user populations.
• Hands-on involvement with UAT, usability testing, or readiness assessments.
• Experience working with Palantir’s Foundry platform.
• Prior experience working in the civic tech space.
• Experience working in a remote-team environment.

Other requirements

• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.
• You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.
• As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust or security clearance.
• You may be required to complete a company background check successfully.
• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require a degree or additional years of experience as a substitute.

Position type

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Location

This is a fully remote position.

Care package

• Salary ranges for Product Manager at Skylight:
• Associate Product Manager: $90,000–$125,000
• Product Manager I: $120,000–$140,000
• Product Manager II: $135,000–$160,000
• Senior Product Manager: $150,000–$185,000
• Staff Product Manager: $170,000–$203,000
• Principal Product Manager: $180,000–$230,000
• Your well-being is important to us, so we focus on supporting you in a variety of ways:
• Medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance.
• Short-term and long-term disability insurance.
• Life and AD&D insurance.
• Dependent care FSA, healthcare FSA, health savings account.
• Dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 10% of your salary with no vesting period.
• Flexible paid-time-off policy (generally around 25 days per year), plus 11 paid federal holidays.
• Up to 12 weeks paid-time-off for all eligible new birth, adoption, or foster parents.
• Performance rewards, including annual salary increase, annual performance bonus, spot bonuses, and stock options.
• Business development / sales bonuses.
• Referral bonuses.
• Annual $2,000 allowance for professional development.
• Annual $750 allowance for tech-related purchases.
• Annual swag budget of $100 to display your Skylight pride with some merchandise (hoodies, hats, and more).
• Flexible, remote-friendly work environment.
• An environment that empowers you to unleash your superpowers for public good.

Interview tips

Visit our join page to learn more about how our interview process works.

Check out our Career Pathways framework to learn more about the different roles within Skylight and the skills needed to do them.

If you’d like to request reasonable accommodations during the application or interviewing process, please contact our recruiting team at [email protected].

We participate in E-Verify and upon hire, will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you’re authorized to work in the U.S.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable law.