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OpenMRS Director of Product 

Job Description

OpenMRS Inc. is a non-profit created solely to support the OpenMRS Community in our mission to improve health care delivery in resource-constrained environments by creating a robust, scalable, user-driven, open source medical record system platform.

Essential Job Functions

The OpenMRS Director of Product role requires a drive for customer satisfaction and delivering results. Your key mission is to ensure that (1) users’ voices are heard clearly, and (2) solutions to users’ needs are delivered. This requires Vision, Strategy, Prioritization, Decision-Making, Product Evangelization, Product Execution, and Capacity Building. 

Product & Project Management

People facilitating product management at OpenMRS are passionate about solving problems with simple, powerful solutions that make care better. They ensure that development moves forward smoothly and meets the real needs of users.

  • Build relationships and influence without direct authority. Talk to users and engage with the community regularly.
  • Drive the product in the right direction. Maintain the product roadmap to prioritize important value, make decisions about priorities and next steps, and work with team and community members to steward those priorities from concept to realization through a directed technical process.
  • Be relentlessly focused on customer value and solving problems for users - this requires embracing the range of customers in this community (e.g. from making life better for contributors, to on-the-ground implementers, to end-users, to partners). 
  • Communicate and evangelize the product vision internally and among the wider community.
  • Apply the Principles of Digital development and the Agile Manifesto by providing clear user stories, gathering user feedback, and working closely with multi-disciplinary team members to help them understand users’ needs (e.g. Design, Development, QA, Communications).
  • Take high-level feature proposals and customer problems and break them into small iterations that engineering can work on.
  • Balance features, improvements, and bugfixes to ensure a high velocity and a stable product.
  • Support squads with product management activities and mentor squad PM volunteers.
  • Monitor, document, report and communicate the status of multiple development projects using relevant software.
  • Manage uncertainty efficiently, adjusting plans to new working conditions.
  • Drive teams to acquire necessary data in order to back assumptions, show value, understand the impact of our work, and drive prioritization.

Platform Governance

  • Collaborate with engineering leads on a strong, coherent vision for the project as a whole, while working with the Director of Community to ensure global coordination.
  • Support implementation of a sustainable, action-oriented team model that will serve the product needs of the community. 
  • Work with developer experts to identify the root of technical issues/challenges.
  • Support documentation that makes the user value clear, along with the steps to achieve that value iteratively.
  • Follow feature development end-to-end in the community, where relevant; provide guidance and feedback to engineers and designers; ensure everyone is aligned.
  • Monitor platform activities to reduce duplication by contributors, where appropriate.
  • Make sure people are working on projects that bring value. 
  • Help unblock issues for faster development and a better developer experience.

Capacity Building

  • Grow, mentor, and support a network of community members engaged in PM, BA, or other related roles, to be as productive as possible and to scale a user-focused approach to problem identification and project/product management.
  • Create mechanisms to ensure users’ problems are clearly heard and understood by the community.
  • Work with volunteer groups and implementers to iterate and improve their offerings for platform value to users.

Strategy & Vision

  • Communicate effectively the OpenMRS Platform vision and strategic direction to all stakeholders.
  • Collaborate with engineering leads on the technical roadmap(s).
  • Follow innovation. Understand emerging technology trends and potential platform/customer impacts.
  • Advise executive management on performance and needs of the community platform. 

Representation & Partnership Development

  • Represent OpenMRS well to valued partners, and help build relationships with these partners.
  • Communication is a big part of the job. Engage with stakeholders in two-way communication to keep parties updated on priorities and realistic timelines.
  • Contribute to documentation, blog posts, demos, and other communication materials.


Primary Performance Indicators for the Role

May be completed earlier.

  • At 3 months: Landscape review complete and presented with recommendations to leadership team. Deliver some small value to platform. Deliver a near-sighted roadmap.
  • At 6 months: Have helped product teams release/deliver intermediate value.

Organizational Learning  

  • As part of our commitment to organizational learning and in support of our understanding that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities they serve - we expect all team members to commit 5% of their time to learning activities that benefit OpenMRS as well as themselves.
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