Associate Product Manager

About us 

Kenect is on a mission to revolutionize customer communication and engagement for businesses across North America. Founded with a deep understanding of the challenges businesses face in connecting with their customers, Kenect helps companies streamline communication, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive growth through its innovative messaging and reputation platform. Trusted by thousands of businesses, our passionate team is committed to building technology that fosters closer connections and helps businesses thrive in a digital-first world.
 

About this role 

We are a fast growing leading SaaS provider in the automotive and specialty dealership software market, and we are seeking a mid-level Associate Product Manager to join our product management team. In this role, you will drive the development of our core platform  domain – focusing on data analytics features, system integrations, and administrative capabilities – to ensure our products deliver maximum value to dealership clients. This role will report to the Head of Product Management. You will be embedded in at least two core engineering teams. 

As Associate Product Manager, you will be responsible for defining and prioritizing product  features, creating user stories, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure successful product delivery. The ideal candidate is customer-focused, tech-savvy, and knowledgeable about automotive dealership operations, acting as the "voice of the customer" within our Scrum teams to drive innovation and product success.
 
What you will be doing 

• Distilling Strategic Context: Take guidance from product leadership as to product direction and focus areas. Distill the strategic context into product requirements for your engineering team to execute upon. 

• Backlog Management: Maintain and prioritize the product backlog, ensuring it is well- groomed with detailed user stories and clear acceptance criteria that reflect user needs, business priorities, and market trends. Regularly refine the backlog to provide the development team with a steady pipeline of valuable work. 

• Agile Planning & Delivery: Collaborate closely with the development teams and senior product leaders to plan and coordinate sprints, prioritizing requirements based on customer needs and resource availability. Participate in Agile ceremonies (planning, reviews, stand-ups) and ensure the most valuable features are delivered in each release. 

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with cross-functional groups – including engineering, design, marketing, business development, and customer support – to ensure cohesive product development and smooth product releases. Facilitate communication across teams so that product features are implemented on time and meet quality standards. 

• Customer Focus & Feedback: Serve as the voice of the customer (in particular, dealership users) throughout the product development process. Gather and analyze user feedback, dealer input, and product usage data to identify pain points and opportunities. Use these insights to inform product decisions and drive continuous improvements in the user experience. 

• Data & Analytics Features: Champion the development of data and analytics capabilities on the platform. Define requirements for dashboards, reporting tools, and data integrations that enable dealerships to gain actionable insights from the system. Continuously monitor key product performance metrics (e.g. user engagement, adoption, retention) and use data-driven insights to measure success and optimize the product. 

• Integration Projects: Oversee the platform’s integration with external systems and APIs, such as Dealer Management Systems (DMS) or other dealership software. Assess and prioritize new integration opportunities and manage these projects end-to-end,coordinating with internal teams, dealer partners, and third-party vendors to ensure successful implementation. This includes ensuring data flows are reliable, secure, and performant across integrated systems. 

• Platform Administration Capabilities: Work to enhance the system’s administrative features (user management, roles/permissions, configuration settings) to meet the needs of enterprise clients (large dealership groups). Ensure that admin tools are intuitive and empower clients to self-service configuration, collaborating with UX/UI designers (e.g. using Figma prototypes) to create an excellent admin experience. 

• Data Quality & Process Improvement: Continuously improve data processes and quality across the platform to maintain high reliability of analytics and integrations. Monitor system performance and data accuracy, establishing procedures for data quality improvement and troubleshooting as needed. Remove friction points that limit the customer experience by applying best practices in automotive software and a deep understanding of our product’s APIs and capabilities. 

• Stakeholder Communication: Communicate product updates, vision, and progress to stakeholders at all levels – from engineers to senior management to customers. Ensure that everyone is informed about upcoming releases and changes. Manage expectations and facilitate trade-off discussions when needed, keeping the team focused on delivering value 

Skills & qualifications 

• Education & Experience: 3+ years in a product or SaaS role, ideally with experience in automotive or dealership software (e.g., DMS tools). A degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field is a plus, not a requirement. 

• Agile Methodology: Solid grasp of Scrum/Kanban with experience managing backlogs, defining MVPs, and supporting iterative delivery in fast-paced environments. 

• Product Management Skills: Demonstrated ability to define product requirements and prioritize features in alignment with business goals. Adept at framing requirements from a lens of jobs to be done and value-oriented success outcomes rather than technical specifications. 

• Technical Acumen: Quick to understand complex systems and integrations. 
• Comfortable discussing architecture, APIs, and data flows. Experience with analytics or integrations is a strong plus. 

• Communication & Collaboration: Strong communicator who works well across teams and adapts messaging for technical and non-technical audiences. Ensures transparency and alignment. 

• Stakeholder Management: Strong stakeholder management and teamwork abilities. 
• Proven experience building positive relationships and trust with diverse groups – from engineers to sales to external partners – and influencing teams to take action without direct authority. 

• Analytical Problem-Solving: Strong analytical skills with a data-driven mindset. Comfortable using metrics and research to diagnose issues and guide decisions. 

• Automotive Domain Knowledge: (Preferred) Experience with dealership operations or software (e.g., sales, service, inventory). Familiarity with DMS data and integrations is a strong plus for platform decision-making. 

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have) 

• Tool Proficiency: Familiarity with modern tools like Jira, Pendo, Asana, and Figma is highly valuable. 

• Certification: CSPO, Agile certification, or Pragmatic Marketing training is a plus, but not required. 

Our company values we hope you showcase 

• Unwavering Customer Obsession  

• See it, Solve it, Get it Done  

• Build, Adapt, Win  

What Kenect offers 

• Health, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability Insurance 

• Your birthday is a paid day off 

• Onsite gym 

• Breakroom full of snacks and drinks 

• Convenient location next to freeway entrance/exit 

We believe in hiring self-motivated team members who can run alongside us without needing to be “managed” along the way. Yes, we have managers and 1:1s. Yes, we believe in giving open two-way feedback. We also believe in having team members that can run without the daily guidance that some companies prefer. 

Kenect is an equal opportunity employer. We are an organization comprised of people of all kinds of backgrounds, and believe this mix is precisely what makes us strong. All employment decisions at Kenect are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion or belief, family or parental status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.