Product Manager-Global Content

Are you a Japanese insurance industry professional with crossover business knowledge and technical capability? Do you have great interpersonal skills, the ability to dig into detail and a focus on customer value? Are you looking for a new challenge? Then join us at Guidewire Software and help build the next generation of insurance solutions for the Japanese market.

Our APAC development centres are responsible for developing and delivering software that leverages and extends the business value of our Core Product suite to global insurance markets. Our centres include teams delivering key market-specific and business-specific functionality as a critical layer of added value designed to meet the varying needs of our diverse customer community.

Product managers at Guidewire assume a wide range of responsibilities. You should have experience researching requirements for enterprise applications, a high degree of comfort with technology, and exceptional analytical and communication skills. You should also be comfortable both engaging in product design discussions with developers and UX designers and working closely with customers to incorporate feedback into the applications. Our product managers are the glue that holds together our product development teams; you will be at the center of our product development effort.

When applying for this role include a cover letter that explains why you want to be part of our team and how your experience sets you up for success.

As a key member of this team, you will:

• Work with our customers to fully understand the business needs that drive their decisions and the true priorities behind those needs, both within individual customer enterprises and across customers within given markets
• Refine those business needs into rational, detailed, and complete product requirements to define the product backlog
• Work closely with developers in an agile process through designs, making tactical decisions and working through corner-cases identified by customers, Guidewire product development, and other Guidewire teams
• Groom and prioritise the feature backlog against outcome oriented goals, coordinating with other Guidewire teams
• Validate the completed features to make sure they meet acceptance criteria
• Be the expert who can help customers, QA, support, sales, and other groups with questions about your feature areas
• Provide expertise and selling tools for the Marketing and Sales organizations for your feature areas, including presenting directly to customers as a thought leader.
• We have a work environment that encourages individual initiative, experiments with new ideas for continuous improvement, and lets great people do great work by minimizing the hassles of hierarchy and bureaucracy. You must be self-motivated and able to work with minimal supervision while collaborating in a team environment, communicating effectively with developers, business analysts and other product managers.

Required skills/experience:

• Enterprise software experience, preferably in a product management role
• Previous experience in the insurance industry is highly desired
• Technical capacity. You should be able to communicate with the engineering team on tactical technical decisions.
• Programming experience is not required but is valued.
• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in business, technology or a related field
• Exceptional analytical skills: the ability to translate high-level requirements into detailed product specifications
• Prefer prior hands-on experience with Agile Development
• Ability to manage complex initiatives with multiple stakeholders, both internal and external
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills
• Strong decision-making skills
• Ability to excel in a team-oriented environment
• A real passion for detailed feature design and problem-solving
• Proficiency in English and Japanese, spoken and written, is required for this role
• If not already resident, a willingness to travel to Japan regularly 

Guidewire Software is a leading provider of flexible, enterprise software products focused on servicing the USD$1.5 trillion property and casualty (general) insurance industry. Our products enable companies such as Sompo Japan Insurance (損保ジャパン), Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire (東京海上日動火災保険) and Mitsui Sumitomo & Aioi Nissay Dowa (三井住友海上火災保険株式会社、あいおいニッセイ同和損害保険株式会社) to efficiently run their high volume, complex and mission-critical insurance operations, including underwriting, policy administration, claims, and billing.

Guidewire is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with regional development centres in Dublin, Kraków, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Chennai and Toronto.

Insurance is the most complicated and under-served software market in the financial services space. The applications we build are large and extraordinarily complex, and support the needs of customers across the diverse global property and casualty insurance market.

If working in a fast-moving, low-bureaucracy environment sounds good to you; if you'd like to work with a team of great engineers, and you would enjoy being part of a financially strong and growing company, then please contact us. If you'd like to learn more about our work environment, please visit http://careers.guidewire.com.