Product Line Manager

Fast Lane Consulting and Education Services, Inc. is a leading Global IT Training Company with its North America headquarters located in Morrisville, North Carolina. Fast Lane offers a broad array of hands-on vendor-authorized IT training classes including Cisco Systems, NetApp, Ironport, IBM, Ubuntu, and VMware, as well as vendor neutral courses developed in house.

SUMMARY – At Fast Lane, a Product Line Manager (PLM) owns the responsibility for achieving revenue and profit targets for specific Fast Lane offerings or products. The PLM creates and manages strategic as well as tactical plans through collaboration with alliance partners, direct and indirect sales, marketing and internal operations teams. The PLM is responsible for managing existing products and for launching new products while achieving business targets including expense budgets, revenue and profit margins.

The position requires personal attributes such as strong organizational and communication skills; a solid understanding of technology concepts and industry trends; technical marketing and writing skills, and the ability to work with and motivate successful sales and support teams. This individual must be a self starter and must be able to work in a remote business environment in a matrix managed environment.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES INCLUDE:

  • General Management & Business Development
    • Responsible for identifying, launching and continuously improving products.
    • Ensure compliance with contract terms and conditions of vendor contracts
    • Identify demand opportunities
    • Support sales in closing opportunities
    • Work with product vendors to drive Fast Lane’s product strategy and develop new product opportunities

  • Innovation and Product Line Management
    • Manage the following product areas:
      • Cisco Collaboration, Voice and Business Video Courses
      • Fast Lane–developed Collaboration Courses
    • Work with product vendor(s) and customers to understand technology trends and develop products to support business needs
    • Develop business case proposed new products
    • Assess demand potential and investments for the development of new courses
    • Perform product implementation planning, communication and collaboration with Operations, Marketing, Sales and WW labs team
    • Meet or exceed revenue and profit goals for assigned product lines
    • Monitor key metrics to ensure optimization of revenue and profit
    • Manage project plans to meet or exceed on-time, on-budget and quality parameters
    • Creation of product masters and maintenance of EMAN and Web course data
    • Work closely with Marketing to create product marketing campaigns, define product value statements and develop marketing copy
    • Support sales team by assisting with the definition/delivery of custom projects and acting in a sales engineering and support role for associated products
    • Provide product training to sales and partners
    • Work closely with key technology vendors to define product opportunities and to support course lifecycle process
    • Maintain good working relationships with partners/vendors, both internal and external, to satisfy customer needs
    • Understand competition and how Fast Lanes products can compete against competitor’s products

  • Planning and Forecasting
    • Develop and manage annual budgets
    • Conduct market analysis to determine product viability, value and positioning
    • Build course training schedules on a quarterly basis and work with operations to harmonize schedules

  • Customer Experience
    • Execute best practices for ensuring excellence in training delivery and performance
    • Review all student evaluation responses to identify areas for improvement
    • Act as the primary point of contact within the assigned product line to rapidly resolve customer satisfaction problems

  • Management Reporting
    • Monitor product line key business indicators including student days, delivery days, fill rate, average student price, revenue/profit per course and revenue/profit per product line to optimize product line’s success
    • Manage financial aspect of product line measuring against the plan
    • Monitor quality assurance metrics for overall customer satisfaction and instructor performance

EDUCATION/EXPERIENCE

  • Ideal candidate will have either a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing with a strong technical background or a Bachelor’s degree in a technical field with a strong marketing background, or technical product management experience in the training industry
  • 5 + years of technical product management/marketing Profit and Loss management experience and a good financial management background
  • Strong project management skills
  • Experience working in IT education or related industry a plus
  • Ability to work well in cross-functional team environments
  • Result-Oriented
  • Focus on metrics and a strict attention to detail
  • Technical knowledge and skills
  • Analytical thinker
  • Strong communication skills
  • Demonstrated success of building and working on successful teams
  • Experience being successfully self directed

TO APPLY

Please email your resume and cover letter, with the subject line "Product Line Manager," to hr@fastlaneus.com.