Enterprise Practice Lead (Product Management) (Remote from anywhere in CO)

Department Information

Together, we innovate for a stronger Colorado

The work of employees at the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) is challenging and diverse because the needs of agencies, customers and Coloradans constantly evolve. But our focus never changes: improve the lives of all Coloradans through innovation and collaboration. We’re building one of the nation’s leading government IT organizations by reimagining how we support agencies, building first-of-their-kind applications, and creating an inclusive, collaborative culture, together. Join us in the important work of providing equitable access to services.

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Description of Job

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The Enterprise Practice Lead, Product Management sets the standard for how product management is practiced across OIT and builds the community of product managers who meet it. OIT is moving from project delivery to product teams that stay accountable for outcomes after launch. Product Managers (PMs) in those pods need a shared standard, a peer community, and a path to grow. The Enterprise Practice Lead builds all three.

Where the PM embedded in a pod owns what gets built and why, the Enterprise Practice Lead owns how product management is practiced at OIT: the standards, tools, training, community, and career infrastructure that make every PM better at the job. OIT’s position is that product ownership belongs with government employees rather than contractors, and that building that capability takes deliberate coaching, standards, and community. This role leads that work.

What this role is. You convene practitioners, write standards with them, teach, coach, and tell leadership where practice is weak and why. Standards earn adoption through your expertise, since the role has no reporting line over the PMs it serves. You won’t run a backlog, a sprint, or a project plan. If your experience is mainly in project management or running agile ceremonies, this role is unlikely to fit.

Where the role sits. Guilds at OIT enable consistency, quality, and community across a federated team structure. Directors of Technology (DTs) manage the people in their pods, including performance evaluation. Enterprise Practice Leads guide and support practitioners and advise DTs on craft. This role reports into OIT’s enterprise standards and governance organization and works alongside the other Enterprise Practice Leads.

Your first 90 days. You will meet the PMs across pods, assess how product management is practiced today, and agree with them the first set of standards and the operating rhythm of the PM community.

What you’ll do

Convene and coach

• Design and run the product management community of practice (the PM guild): regular convenings, peer critique, shared retrospectives, and the culture of a discipline that takes its craft seriously. Keep track of who is in the community and make sure PMs can reach the guidance, training, and tools they need.

Set standards with practitioners

• Write and maintain standards with practitioners: how prioritization is done and documented, how backlogs and stories are written, and what planning cadence to expect. Ground them in outcomes rather than activity tracking, and include shared framing tools such as problem statements, product vision documents, and success measure frameworks.
• Set tooling standards: which tools PMs use, how they are configured, and what consistency looks like across the portfolio, without locking teams into setups that do not fit their context. Work with Enterprise Architecture on guidance for using AI tools in product work.
• Translate Enterprise Architecture product principles into guidance, templates, playbooks, and examples of strong backlogs and prioritization rationale that PMs across pods can adapt in their own agency contexts, without having to interpret enterprise strategy themselves.

Build capability

• Develop training programs that build sustained, statewide capability through ongoing practice rathe…