Product Manager - Duke Manufacturing

Duke is a 99-year old, family-owned, global company. As a family-owned business we take a long-term view, providing stable employment in a team-based environment. Our culture is centered on our Values such as Courage, Doing the Right Thing, Honesty, Dignity and Humility.

Duke's innovative products and Your Solutions Partner brand promise to our customers create a collaborative, fast-paced work environment built on principles of strategic customer partnerships, agile product development, and lean manufacturing.

Job Summary:

Provide leadership and drive the business strategy for assigned product categories. Increase overall product health by driving new product development, increasing product profitability, and sustaining the value and relevance of existing product portfolio. Achieve this through deep understanding of markets, technology, and customer pains/gains.

Support Enterprise and Value Stream business aims by providing business and competitive product analyses, market research, leadership of new product development and commercialization, life cycle management of our products, and hands-on product and project management work. PM will serve the Enterprise by aggregating value stream individual product needs where possible into product platforms that fulfill the greater good for Enterprise - striking compromises where needed and managing individual product lines for overall product category profitability.

Essential Functions:

1. Product Category Management - Provide product and category leadership and management, including prioritization of activities within the product lifecycle.
2. Market and Customer Insights - Understand market, customer and technology trends including the competitive landscape. Lead voice of customer (VOC) and environment of customer (EOC) activities.
3. NPD Commercialization - Be the customer advocate for needs/features/value, prioritizing to drive minimum viable product (MVP) thinking. Lead commercialization plans.
4. Product Profitability - Drive strategic pricing and VA/VE activities. Collaborate with marketing and value stream to clearly articulate value propositions.
5. Create Customer Value - Uncover consequential customer pains/gains through VOC & EOC activities.
6. Expand/Leverage Product Platforms - Scale existing platforms to new customers, fold existing products into platforms and create platforms around new opportunities.
7. Portfolio Management - Discover, develop, and filter attractive product/service/business model opportunities.
8. Sales Enablement - Sustaining daily guidance and support - balancing customer and business needs.

The above list of essential duties is not exhaustive. It only defines some of the main responsibilities. An employee may be required to perform additional tasks not listed above.

Job Qualifications:

1. Experience: 5-7 years' experience (business to business) in product management, product development, or product marketing. Capital goods experience preferred.
2. Education: Masters degree / MBA preferred, or a Bachelor's degree and relevant on-the-job training and experience
3. Skills:
   1. Strong business acumen and insight. Uses knowledge of marketplace business drivers, strategies, and tactics to guide decisions. Utilizes quantitative and qualitative data analysis to drive decision-making.
   2. Strategic Mindset. Skilled at uncovering spoken and unspoken pain, linking trends to business implications, and working through ambiguity to identify gaps and test value propositions.
   3. High decision quality and judgement. Strong critical thinking skills - able to uncover root cause, evaluate tradeoff decisions, and pull information from multiple diverse sources to drive decision making, even in the absence of complete information.
   4. Self-motivated, takes initiative and drives results. Skilled at aligning organization, keeping an aggressive cadence, and setting priorities.
   5. Strong verbal and written communication and interpersonal skills. Is effective in a variety of communication settings: one on one, small and large groups, or among diverse styles and position levels.
   6. Customer focus. Seeks engagement with customers and partners to learn, gain insights, and validate solutions.
   7. Technical Acumen. Ability to understand available and future technologies to drive product strategy.

Travel/Location Requirements:

1. Up to 25% travel may be required to customer locations, trade shows and conventions.
2. This is a hybrid work-from-home position that requires the employee to be able to work in our St. Louis office up to three (3) days per week.

See Job Description for full details.

Duke is an equal opportunity employer.