Product Manager

As a Product Manager embedded in our Data Sciences Software division you belong to the functional team whose work encompasses product strategy, product delivery, product management & product operations. You and your colleagues in Product Management specifically are charged with:

-Targeting R&D investments towards maximum value for customers and business ROI.

-Being accountable for decision-making, problem selection, and business outcomes.

-Guiding product lifecycle from ideation to development to go-to-market to scaled product-market-fit.

This role requires skillsets, experience, and competencies in:

-Execution & Delivery: Cross-team Collaboration, Judgement & Decision Making, Responsibility for Outcomes

-Research & Strategy: Stakeholder Engagement, Data & Market Analysis, Thought Leadership

Note: This Job Description is for "Product Manager," but we strongly encourage candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and unique career paths to apply. We are also open to ADJUST the role to any of the junior/precursor roles of "Product Analyst I, II, or III" to facilitate promising candidates who are eager to start their Product Management journey, but not yet ready to take on the full breadth of Product Manager duties.

This specific Product Manager role is for our Pinnacle 21 Enterprise (P21E) base/foundational roadmap team.

-P21E is a mature and successful SaaS product, and its base/foundational modules form the underpinning upon which the new/advanced roadmap team builds (e.g., our Data Exchange and Metadata Repository modules).

-Working on the base/foundational modules brings interesting opportunities and constraints.

1) This space is "highly known," so you will have many years of metrics to work with, as well as an existing user base of several hundred client companies (including government health authorities) and tens of thousands of client users, and a ready queue of feature requests.

2) However, this space is also "highly relied on," as it is critically depended on by both a large user base and the new/advanced roadmap team. So your mandate is more akin to respecting Chesterton's Fence and vowing "Primum non nocere" than it is to creative experimentation.

3) Given 1) and 2), you will need to proposed features, improvements, and processes that prioritize stability, robustness, and interoperability (e.g., for the many internal and 3rd party systems that interact with the base/foundational modules via API or CLI).

-This role will likely see the most success with candidates who are both 1) extremely thorough in doing internal interviews ("institutional archeology") to grasp the history of decision making behind the status quo, 2) extremely conservative and defensive in their approach towards introducing change, 3) extremely rigorous in debugging, testing, analyzing, and documenting the implicit and explicit requirements of the system.

-Several dozen of us at Certara are ourselves expert users of P21E. The upside for you is that you'll have as many mentors as you want. The downside is that you may feel like you're playing "catchup" for the next 1-2 years as you absorb our last decade of accumulated knowledge.

Execution & Delivery

Cross-team Collaboration

-Fluidly navigates the software development process and reviews the work of engineers and test engineers against self-written success criteria

-Peer-reviews others' ideas, with strong sense of internal/external impacts/risks/constraints, resulting in profitable rewrites.

Judgement & Decision Making

-Invents requirements for user stories of large value

-Documents client use cases, decisions, and business logic to allow full visibility for the team, keeping pace with evolving, complex, domain-specific and technical requirements, extending to cross-product integrations

-Translates leaders' product visions into actionable priorities and counter-proposes compelling priorities

-Frames decisions with clear objectives and context, trading off well among internal vs external stakeholder needs and long-term vs short-term goals.

Responsibility for Outcomes

-Deliberate in proposing resource investments and achieves outcomes, including ownership of metrics such as near-term project budget and long-term user adoption.

Research & Strategy

Stakeholder Engagement

-Without prompting, interviews clients with deep counter-questioning that reveals their out-of-product workflows and offers insightful conclusions-vetting those conclusions against hard data.

Data & Market Analysis

-Instruments and interprets new product data analytics from multiple sources, and deeply parses competitors' offerings, to measure impact of past and present R&D efforts-with ability to pinpoint success factors.

Thought Leadership

-Explains the product when called upon to internal (e.g., sales) audiences and clients via semi-structured live demos

-Attends tradeshows to showcase offerings and produces at least one publication or presentation per year (company webinars, industry journals, 3rd party conferences, etc.)

Must Have

-Fastidious for facts, insistent on evidence- and data-driven choices, able to separate signal from noise

-Systems-thinking and ability to predict or extrapolate to second, third, and fourth order effects (if A, then B, then C, then D...)

-Adept at analytics, independent research, unscripted interviews, and other intel-gathering techniques

-Not afraid to speak up and veto a bad idea, or have your ideas vetoed (our default is "NO") in favor of what our team decided to prioritize next

-Curious about our clients and products, cautious with our brand and industry goodwill, conscientious in follow-through

-Willing to learn and serve, flexible in adapting to rapid organizational change, receptive of constructive criticism

-High tolerance for ambiguity, low tolerance for mess; able to create order out of chaos, attend to details, and push quality higher

-Relentlessly resourceful and discerning in solving problems independently vs. seeking help from others; brave yet humble in working across multi-disciplinary teams where each person is more of an expert than you in their chosen field

Preferred

-Intimate familiarity with a specific scientific domain, such as biosimulation, PK/PD modelling, clinical trial data standardization and analysis, etc.

-Ability to work in a remote position requiring constant spoken and written communication; skill in exerting influence (even on company founders, owners, and partners) without leverage or managerial authority

-Education or qualifications relating to business, programming, data science, health sciences, medical writing, customer support, project management, or corporate communications

-Experience working for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, clinical laboratory, pharmaceutical company, or Contract Research Organization (CRO)

Certara bases all employment-related decision on merit, taking into consideration qualifications, skills, achievement, and performance. We treat all applicants and employees without regard to personal characteristics such as race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, nationality, marital status, pregnancy, physical or mental condition, genetic information, military service, or other characteristic protected by law.