Sr Director, Independent Agent Solutions

The Sr. Director, Independent Agent Solutions leader is a key member of the Experience & Strategy and Distribution & Marketing leadership teams. This leader is responsible for translating our US retail market (USRM) business strategies into domain-level software product / technology strategies and roadmaps (e.g. improve IA channel growth). S/he will be directly responsible for partnering closely with key business stakeholders (e.g., Field, Process, Analytics) and technology partners in order to create clarity around the prioritized business objectives (that advance our USRM goals) and prioritize both business and technology objectives in order to drive short-to-long term results. In addition, s/he will ensure the team is advancing our product craft by leveraging internal capabilities (e.g., Experience Research, Experience Design). In addition, as a senior leader in the Experience & Strategy organization, s/he will be responsible for developing the skills and practices of our collective team, ensuring alignment across other domains, and providing leadership to the organization at large.

The Distribution & Marketing portfolio includes key experience portfolios such as “I Buy I Sell Insurance Professional – Independent Agent” and key platforms such as Compensation, Book Transfer, State Auto, etc. This role will work with upstream (e.g., product) and downstream (e.g., servicing) partners to ensure coordination sequencing of work to enhance our customer, agent, employee, partner journeys across USRM.

Key Responsibilities

• Works closely with business units to take business strategy and translate into product strategies in order to support overall business objectives.
• Represents the business by communicating the product vision broadly and effectively to key stakeholders and Sr. Management.
• Allocates investment across products and ensures sufficient resources.
• Owns the overall product backlog and provides guidance to product owners on the scrum teams that comprise the complete effort. Uses the overall backlog to coordinate the work of product teams, through each team`s product owner.
• Functions as the final arbiter at the product level to order work and accepts the final release plan. Manages final escalation on tradeoffs across the product portfolio.
• Provides customer-oriented feedback on product and feature demos for scrum sub teams.
• Provides leadership to agile product teams and has direct managerial responsibilities for Product Owners and other Agile development team roles. Defines objectives and development plans in alignment with IT and business objectives. Manages team to achieve business results.
• Champions Agile development methodology transformation across the company through contribution to Agile education initiatives and communicating agile principles to executive audiences. Monitors the application of Agile principles across product teams.