Senior Product Manager, Data Commons

ABOUT XPRIZE 

XPRIZE competitions change the world for the better by accelerating innovation life cycles, catalyzing markets, and energizing stakeholders.  

The XPRIZE Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to inspiring and incentivizing breakthroughs to the most critical challenges facing humanity. Since its beginning in 1994, the Foundation has been building and continues to build a vision of hope and abundance for humanity’s future by harnessing the power of innovators, technology, and resources.  

Through incentive prize competitions, XPRIZE enables people to create bold and transformative solutions that are scalable and drive real impact. XPRIZE competitions positively impact both the marketplace and humanity by addressing the market failures that have prevented significant breakthroughs across multiple sectors.  

An XPRIZE… 

sets an audacious but achievable goal that aims to overcome challenges deemed impossible. It tackles some of humanity's most pressing issues by redefining what is achievable and pushing the boundaries of human potential.  

defines and addresses a clear problem through extensive research, a design sprint, and a competition that catalyzes the development of the next breakthroughs to put humanity on the path toward a preferred future state for all. The desired outcome from an XPRIZE is clear and measurable, and the rules of the competition are transparent and easily understood.  

democratizes innovation by encouraging expert and nonexpert participation and multidisciplinary collaboration.  

catalyzes markets and revitalizes stagnant industries by increasing awareness of market failures and accelerating innovations to address them.  

is highly leveraged, with competing teams attracting and mobilizing investment capital, partner support, and new members in pursuit of the prize. Philanthropic dollars are thus magnified in support of a solution.   

Our first XPRIZE, the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for private spaceflight, spurred an industry and created exponential breakthroughs. Since then we have provided over $140 million in incentives through these competitions. Each prize has created an industry-changing technology that brings us closer to a better, safer, more sustainable world.   

The use of incentive competitions, or prizes, to accelerate innovation goes back over 300 years, to when the British Admiralty launched the Longitude Prize in 1714 to find a better way to navigate our seas. In the years since, several well-known innovations have resulted from incentive competitions, including canning as a form of food preservation (a competition launched by Napoleon in 1795), modern plastics (the Billiard Ball Prize, 1863) and commercial aviation (the Orteig Prize, 1919).   

This is more than a job to us. When you work at XPRIZE, you’re making a positive impact on some of the biggest challenges facing our world. Whether you’re working in prize design or development, marketing and communications, stakeholder relations, business operations or any other department, you’re playing a critical role in turning the impossible into the possible.

ROLE DESCRIPTION

XPRIZE competitions create exponential impact. With each competition we have engaged hundreds of companies, nonprofits, changemakers, and innovators to develop hardware and software solutions that solve seemingly impossible global grand challenges. These competitions galvanize exponential investment as innovators collectively invest 10-20+ times the amount of the prize purse in research, design, and time to develop their solutions.

With the rise of AI and machine learning, XPRIZE is expanding expand its model to employ data, an increasingly prominent and largely untapped resource, to solve grand challenges better, faster, and cheaper. By democratizing access to data and AI tools for problem-solvers regardless of their geography or funding, all great ideas have an equal shot at success.

XPRIZE is creating a very large-scale SaaS based Data Commons and AI tools to help support its teams to better tackle challenges on a global level.

Context:

Reporting directly to the CTO and General Manager of Innovation, this individual will have responsibility for defining our data commons cloud based features, the application level and solutions strategy; defining new services based on market demand and working with software development internally and externally to build these services; and assist in defining and executing the go to market strategy.

 Working closely with software development, customers, executive leadership, and sales & marketing team, the product manager will leverage his/her technical, analytical, process and strategic skills towards executing high impact value added opportunities that will drive the next phase of growth for our data commons. The role requires an individual with strong leadership who can create and evangelize a transformative vision for data commons direction; collaborate with and drive a strong team to continue our tradition of building groundbreaking products and services help to develop new ideas based on industry experience and contact with customers, prospects and partners and nurture a vibrant ecosystem to deliver infrastructure products that are optimized for the Teradata platform and customers.

The role requires an individual with strong analytical, leadership, and partnering skills. The ideal candidate possesses a unique blend of business and technical savvy; a big-picture, predictive vision; and the drive, influencing skills and ability to collaborate with all invested parties to transform that vision into a reality. He/she must also enjoy spending time in the market to understand customer problems and find innovative solutions for the broader market.

Product managers are the drivers of their products and are responsible for defining, prioritizing, planning and driving the execution of the vision for their product lines. Product managers must possess business acumen as well as engineering wherewithal in order to be able to strategize, drive and bring their product to market. Product managers must work extensively with customers while working cross functionally with marketing, software development, stakeholder relations, prize operations, prize design, and competitors and judges in order to successfully prioritize features and develop the products that our customers need.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage the implementation of the next-generation data commons, and ensure we are building globally usable, scalable software
• Execute product strategy, vision and road map based on leadership direction
• Lead requirement specifications, refine requirements, drive adoption, lead user acceptance testing, and address business and system issues.
• Assist in the nurturing and growing of partnerships, internally and externally, in order to continue to build out the data commons platform
• Communicate the benefits and champion the product throughout the organization and with internal and external partners
• Provide support to internal teams as needed in collecting or delivering information on product information and gathering data

REQUIREMENTS 

• At least 3-4 years of experience in product management in a Cloud/ As a Service environment
• At least 5-7 years’ technical experience in defining, building, and overseeing product launch
• Specific systems and cloud management domain experience in large and/or small start-up companies required
• BA/BS required, in Computer Science or related technical degree preferred, MBA desirable
• Excellent listening, oral and written communication/presentation skills with strong ability to influence people at all levels and in various functions
• Strong awareness of technology trends and their potential influence on Teradata’s business
• Strong teaming skills and experience to bring together diverse views.

Come change the world with us.

XPRIZE Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to having a truly inclusive workforce. We do not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, national origin, marital status, age, disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation or on the basis of actual or perceived gender as expressed through dress, appearance, or behavior.