Staff Product Manager, Technical (HHS)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today’s digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.

The work we do matters.

About the job

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 product decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to figure out what to build next, why it matters, and how to turn that direction into something a multidisciplinary team can deliver.

A technical product manager specializes in work with significant technical depth — enterprise platforms, cloud environments, APIs, data systems, integrations, and application modernization — where product decisions depend on understanding the underlying architecture, operational constraints, and engineering tradeoffs.

Skylight supports HHS’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) across a growing portfolio of high-visibility digital modernization work. New initiatives can arrive quickly and without fully defined requirements, users, technical approaches, or implementation plans. We need a Staff Product Manager who can bring structure to that ambiguity and help HHS move from a problem or mandate to an actionable strategy, roadmap, and delivered outcome.

The work spans two related areas:

Enterprise platform optimization. Helping HHS make better use of enterprise platforms by identifying shared needs across Divisions, shaping platform and integration strategies, establishing scalable patterns, and supporting adoption of shared services.

Modern digital services and applications. Leading multidisciplinary teams that design, build, launch, and continuously improve production-ready digital services and applications — from early discovery and prototypes through enterprise-scale implementation and ongoing operations.

You’ll own one or more workstreams and flex between strategic product leadership and hands-on delivery. Depending on the initiative, you may help define an emerging enterprise platform strategy, conduct discovery with HHS Divisions, turn an operational problem into a product roadmap, guide a prototype toward production, or lead the continued development of an existing digital service.

What to know going in

This is not a role where every project arrives with a defined product, backlog, technical architecture, or implementation plan.

Some workstreams will begin with questions like: What problem are we actually trying to solve? Which HHS Divisions need this capability? Should this be a shared enterprise service or a Division-specific solution? What already exists? What should we standardize? What should we build? And what should happen first?

Others will involve existing applications that already have users and stakeholders and need to move quickly through feature development, integration, launch, adoption, and ongoing improvement.

You’ll need to be comfortable operating at both levels.

At the enterprise level, you may work with architects, engineers, platform owners, and HHS stakeholders to understand how platforms; identify opportunities for shared services and tenant integration; define priorities and adoption strategies; and translate technical possibilities and constraints into decisions leaders can act on.

At the product level, you’ll work closely with designers, researchers, and engineers to turn user and operational needs into working software. Current and emerging application work may include enterprise mentoring, security tooling and analytics, employee onboarding, and other internal digital services.

Across both areas, speed matters. You should be comfortable learning enough to act, showing early work, testing assumptions, and refining the approach as the team learns rather than waiting for perfect information before moving forward.

What you’ll do

Help federal stakeholders align and make decisions

Build and own the roadmap for digital services, from first prototype to a products HHS & Divisions rely on

Work through technical decisions with engineers

Translate needs from leadership and government partners into a product vision, objectives, and measures of success

Ship early prototypes, gather feedback, and iterate quickly rather than waiting for complete requirements

Write user stories, prioritize the backlog, and build release plans

What we’re looking for

Basic qualifications

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

Product experience with data ingestion and normalization across many sources (APIs, batch exports, streaming), and enough technical depth to work through warehouse and data modeling tradeoffs with data engineers

Experience working on cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering, ops) in iterative delivery

A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values

Nice-to-haves

Experience with multi-tenant cloud environments, enterprise platform consolidation, tenant rationalization, shared services, or cross-organizational platform adoption.

Experience delivering data and analytics products, including data ingestion, APIs, data pipelines, warehouses or lakehouses, data modeling, and access controls.

Experience developing or implementing enterprise integration patterns, including identity and access management, single sign-on, APIs, and data-sharing workflows.

Experience taking a prototype or internal tool through production hardening, launch, and ongoing operations.

Experience modernizing legacy applications or replacing manual business processes with digital services.

Experience supporting organizational change, product adoption, migrations, or onboarding to shared technology services.

Experience delivering technology in government, regulated industries, large federated organizations, or other public-benefit settings.

Experience working with federal CIO organizations or enterprise IT organizations where technology ownership and decision-making are distributed across multiple components or business units.

A track record of staying aligned and accountable on remote teams

Don’t meet every qualification but think you can do the job? We’d still love to hear from you. If you’re excited about the role, apply. We consider candidates with a range of backgrounds and experiences.

Other requirements

Some of our available rol