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Product Engineering Manager
The Brief
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About Skype
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Skype is software that enables the world's conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Everyday, people everywhere also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles. Download Skype to your computer or mobile phone at skype.com
Skype is changing to become more efficient, nimble and faster in its approach to developing and delivering new market-leading, disruptive communications software products. To do this, we are quickly evolving our software architecture, software release processes and development and delivery capabilities throughout our Product and Engineering organisations.
Central to this aim are our Product Engineering Managers (PEMs) who will work as a peer to Skype's Product Managers to lead Skype's Engineering teams in delivering high quality products on time.
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The Business Specific brief
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Reporting to a Sr Product Engineering Manager or a Director of Portfolio Engineering, the Product Engineering Manager (PEM) will work as a peer to a Product Manager and will co-own a key Skype product from concept through to end of life.
The Product Engineering Manager is accountable for planning and delivering releases against the agreed release policy and for managing the engineering team through the software development lifecycle. This accountability includes feature and maintenance releases and any needed continuous improvement of product, process and quality. It also includes fully involving Site Operations and Customer Support, both as a source of requirements and to ensure smooth transition to production.
Key tasks include:
- Co-creating the release policy with Product Management
- Supporting product roadmap planning by providing engineering perspective/input
- Developing and agreeing release plans (incl. resourcing) with Product Management
- Driving each release through to launch while meeting the policy's release criteria
- Ensuring that Skype's software development lifecycle procedure and standards are applied
- Maintaining release schedule and integrity/quality for each product build or change
- Owning and executing the release change control process
- Coordinating with QE/QA for test execution, Beta and Gold launches
- Continued ownership of all releases for assigned products through time
The successful candidate will have software development experience in addition to excellent programme / team management, organizational, collaboration, communication and influencing skills.
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Key Responsibilities
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Building the Release Plan
The Product Engineering Manager must continuously plan for and deliver a sequence of releases and ensure the maximum throughput from his/her team against priorities that he/she influences, but where the Product Manager will agree release plans and authorize releases. To do this, the PEM will:
- Co-create, maintain/improve, execute and report against the release policy
- Challenge and contribute to the product and technical requirements to ensure that they are a business priority and that they are complete (e.g. include non-functional requirements)
- Translate requirements into a series of release plans to a horizon of 2-3 releases
- Ensure that each release plan reflects Mandatory and Desired requirements and that the plans are resourced with major milestones, dependencies and risks identified with mitigations, and all costs (OPEX and if required, then CAPEX)
- The PEM will work agree the in/out of scope features and functions for production, ensure clarity of accountability for each release and work with engineering colleagues to begin the development process.
Deliver Against the Release Plan
The Product Engineering Manager will lead the Engineering team to adhere to the release policy, apply the Skype software development lifecycle management processes and standards and deliver the content of each release as committed. This will include:
- Develop and maintain release plans, which details the tasks, deliverables, milestones and launch milestones for each release,
- Leading the Engineering team to detail out sprints, tasks and requirements as required within the release plan;
- Work with the Product Manager to manage (and minimize) change to the plans once a release has started;
- For essential change, ensuring that the impact of change is properly understood before its decided on and that changes to release plans are agreed and communicated;
- Provide regular reporting of progress against the plan to Product Manager and address any issue arising with Product Management and Engineering colleagues as appropriate.
- Most importantly, lead the team to optimize its development output: maintaining morale, solving problems, managing risks and making tactical decisions on content.
Secure Release To Distribution
The Product Engineering Manager's ultimate aim is software products performing reliably in the production environment. To achieve this the PEM will:
- Ensure availability of the release build environment and sourcing adequate test resources and equipment needed;
- Lead the Engineering team through Beta and Gold release milestones, ensuring delivery to defined quality criteria and prioritizing bugs and defects to be removed with the Product Manager;
- Engage Site Operations (live environment hosting web, back-end, database, etc.) and Customer Support, ensure that they are involved at the right time and with the right level of engagement during the release execution to support each release into the market and achieve acceptable transition into production.
- Securing requirements from Site Operations and Customer Services should be done before or during release planning. At the release point, the aim is to ensure that Site Operations and Customer Services have all the needed technical information / engineering support to enable the product to perform reliably in the production environment (e.g. support documents, diagnostic tools, roll-back procedures).
Provide Leadership, Direction and Support to Engineering Team
- The Product Engineering Manager leads the engineering team and has line management responsibility for that team
- The Product Engineering Manager is responsible for supervising, motivating, supporting, providing guidance and developing Software Engineers and Release Managers (when applicable) working on their Product
- The Product Engineering Manager works with and co-ordinates with the appropriate QE/QA lead in order to manage and direct the QE/QA activities associated with the product, but is not the primary/line manager for QA/QE resources
- Where relevant, the Product Engineering Manager manages relationships with third party outsourcing partners in conjunction with the Product Manager.
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Candidate Profile
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Pre-requisite Knowledge, Skills and Experience
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Expertise/Experience
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- Minimum 5+ years in a development position as an individual contributor
- Demonstrated experience with complex programme and project management engagements
- Proven managerial experience in building, developing and managing highly effective engineering teams (leading teams, defining schedules, proven release track record)
- Highly professional, with a demonstrated ability to deliver high quality work on tight schedules
- Demonstrated ability to manage teams in a globally distributed environment
- Experience working in a product-focused company vs. internal IT environment
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Behaviours
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Organisation, Planning and Detail Orientation
- Excellent collaborative and team engagement skills
- Self motivated, independent and proactive
- Highly effective organizational skills with the ability to consolidate and integrate a wide range of inputs, information and constant variances
- Flexibility to effectively handle ambiguity, and translate technical documentation into a discrete set of tasks and have the ability to switch gears in response to events and circumstances
- The candidate will need to demonstrate strong leadership in setting and driving complex programme plans, identifying, resolving and escalating problems - initiating appropriate changes to ensure planned delivery on-time and within budget.
Communication, Facilitation and Coordination
- Driving ambiguity to clarity
- Self motivated, independent, and proactive
- Strong leadership skills and ability to work well with a diverse team
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Qualifications:
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- • BS/MS in computer science or equivalent experience required
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Location: Tallinn, Estonia (preferred) or Prague, Czech Republic
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We're Hiring: http://www.jobs.skype.com/
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