About Skylight
Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services.
We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.
If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists.
The work we do matters.
About the job
At Skylight, product managers are responsible for strategy, planning, execution, stakeholder management, and team health. Product managers partner with researchers, designers, engineers, client stakeholders, and others to inform their product decisions. At a high level, it’s the product manager’s job to figure out what to build next and why.
A technical product manager specializes in products with significant technical depth — platforms, APIs, data systems, or modernization efforts — where product decisions depend on fluency with the underlying architecture and engineering tradeoffs.
The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is expanding surge support and capacity for its new Data Capacity and Digital Services organization within the Office of Administration, through the option year of our Task Order 1 contract. The team works with enterprise-serving organizations like ACF Tech and the Office of Grants Management to help programs deliver on ACF’s mission, including priorities focused on reducing grantee burden; reducing waste, fraud, and abuse; and modernizing legacy systems.
You’ll lead product work that spans rapid-turnaround surge requests and signature modernization efforts, working directly with ACF staff to decide what’s worth building and why. Much of this work sits on top of platforms like Palantir Foundry, Databricks, and enterprise AI tools, so you’ll need technical fluency to weigh architecture and data tradeoffs alongside your engineers.
What to know going in
This work calls for a consultant’s skill set: you’ll interface directly with senior leaders, and much of the work isn’t scoped in advance. This isn’t a team where you simply prioritize existing work in a backlog. You’ll need a working understanding of service design and fluency to engage with AI-forward delivery teams, including data scientists, Foundry engineers designers and others. Alongside delivery, we do a lot of technical consulting and capacity building, so people who take initiative and are comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity tend to do best here.
What you’ll do
Lead a cross-functional team of researchers, designers, engineers, and subject matter experts to build and ship high-impact products and services
Shape loosely defined, unscoped problems into a clear product strategy, including vision, objectives, measures of success, roadmap, and backlog
Translate policy and program requirements from ACF leadership into technical solutions the team can deliver, and keep plans current as priorities shift
Write and prioritize user stories, build release plans, and facilitate team ceremonies such as planning, stakeholder syncs, and retrospectives
Work in close partnership with government teams to help them build digital skills and product knowledge throughout the course of the project
Creatively navigate bureaucratic challenges, paving the way for more intuitive processes in the future
What we’re looking for
Basic qualifications
Can develop a product strategy grounded in the problem to be solved, prioritizing outcomes over features, with a roadmap and clear success criteria
Apply lean and agile principles (e.g., minimum viable product) to validate assumptions early, break scope into small chunks of value, maintain a prioritized backlog of validated user stories, and facilitate ceremonies on cross-functional teams (product, design, engineering, ops)
Experience applying service design methods, such as journey mapping, service blueprinting, and contextual inquiry, to uncover pain…