Javelina Product Organization

Purpose & How to Use This Document

This job description defines the Product Manager role as designed in the target-state operating model. It has two variants depending on assignment, described in Section 4. This is a draft description for the target state - actual hiring, reassignment, and talent mapping from today's fused PM/PO role have not yet happened, and are addressed separately in the phasing discussion. The companion Product Owner role is documented in a separate job description.

1. Role Summary

Product Managers own outcomes and prioritization for an assigned scope. The scope differs by variant - a persona-facing, end-to-end journey (Cluster/Journey PM) or a deep technical capability shared across journeys (Domain/Platform PM) - but the core mandate is the same: define the right problems, make high-quality solution decisions in partnership with Design and Engineering, and represent the customer or business view for that scope.

2. Key Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap and prioritization for the assigned journey or domain, translating strategy into a clear problem statement, success metric, and primary persona for every initiative before development begins.
• Partner with Design and Engineering to make solution decisions directly, without requiring leadership to prescribe features.
• Maintain a decision log for major initiatives, capturing options considered and tradeoffs made.
• Own backlog intent and value cases - the "why" and "what" behind backlog items - while leaving backlog readiness and story refinement to the Product Owner.
• Represent the assigned persona(s) or domain in the weekly PM/PO Sync - the default venue for resolving front/back prioritization contention and for introducing new strategic direction into the backlog.
• Escalate unresolved prioritization or capacity conflicts to the Product Council rather than resolving them unilaterally or letting them stall at the team level.
• Domain/Platform PM variant: safeguard the domain's protected delivery capacity and represent it as a standing member of the Product Council.
• Cluster/Journey PM variant: coordinate with the Growth/New Products PM and other Cluster PMs when initiatives span multiple journeys or reuse shared back-end domains.

3. What This Role Does Not Own

• Backlog readiness, story refinement, sprint execution, acceptance, or release readiness - these belong to the Product Owner.
• Daily standups or sprint ceremonies - PMs engage at sprint boundaries (planning, review), not day to day.
• Unilateral override of a Product Owner's "ready" or "done" call on standard backlog items; escalation is reserved for genuinely new scope.

4. Variants

5. Qualifications & Experience

• Experience owning product outcomes in a complex, regulated domain (health plan administration, insurance, or comparable).
• For Domain/Platform PM variants: deep subject-matter depth in the specific domain - claims adjudication and medical policy, actuarial-adjacent benefit plan structures, or eligibility/enrollment rules - is required.
• Demonstrated ability to make solution decisions in partnership with Design and Engineering without requiring feature-level direction from leadership.
• Skilled at eliciting and accurately capturing requirements from diverse stakeholders - customers/personas, Design, and Engineering - and translating ambiguous input into clear problem statements.
• Able to organize and synthesize large amounts of information - research, stakeholder input, dependency data - into a coherent, prioritized roadmap.
• Comfortable resolving conflict and competing priorities directly, escalating to the Product Council only when resolution isn't possible at the PM/PO level.
• Strong cross-team collaborator - works fluidly with Design, Engineering, other Product Managers, and Commercialization/Innovation stakeholders.
• Disciplined about process adherence - follows the defined planning and review cadence rather than bypassing it with ad hoc escalation.