Product Manager, Senior

Your Role:

The Health Plan Correspondence (HPC) Vendor Management team is accountable for all components of vendor management for BSC’s strategic/transactional print vendor relationships. The Product Manager, Senior will report to the Sr Manager of Vendor Management. In this role you will initially be assigned to manage the entire BSC book of business at O’neil Data Services (ODS), including partnering closely with vendor account and sales teams, the HPC team, marketing, brand, comms governance, GBS, IT Risk Security, Internal Audit, Stellarus, and other BSC stakeholders with work at ODS.  In time, your scope will evolve to support other vendors and/or specializing in a specific modular component(s) of vendor management.

Our leadership model is about developing great leaders at all levels and creating opportunities for our people to grow – personally, professionally, and financially. We are looking for leaders that are energized by creative and critical thinking, building and sustaining high-performing teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.

Your Work

In this role, you will:

• Identify and understand key personas for product areas. Exhibits natural and intuitive user empathy
• Determine and analyze KPIs at a feature level to establish experience success, failures and next steps through iteration
• Conduct secondary market research with some assistance
• Effectively organize brainstorming sessions
• Participate and engage in agile ceremonies; facilitate those required for product artifacts as they support product outcomes

• Manage daily output vendor operational performance as a product, starting with the entire BSC book of business at ODS (marketing + transactional).  This includes managing the backlog of projects with the vendor, SLA monitoring, incident, and compliance metrics, functioning as the trusted liaison between stakeholders and vendor, and support stakeholders until BSC’s close of business at 5 pm.  You have strong, proactive communication skills and gracefully navigate stakeholder and vendor conflicts

• Learn the details of your vendor's contract and ensure vendor management is aligned.  Initiate and manage contract amendments with GBS in support of stakeholder needs. File contracts with applicable governing agencies

• Work very closely with output types such as EOBs, Checks, Bills, letter systems such as MHK, Care Connect, and SmartComm

• Demonstrate ability to learn from output owners and speak to them with expertise and understanding of their output

• Work fluently in Jira, creating epics, stories, and tasks to accurately and timely reflect your work.  Create Confluence/Grid pages when needed.  Use AI to build agents to automate portions of your job, but retain your SME knowledge to audit and adjust your agent as needed

• Pull reports to manage day-to-day vendor execution, demonstrate proof of vendor compliance, and use data to drive decisions. You will own vendor metrics and work confidently in Excel and Tableau to create MBR/QBR/KPI material to highlight vendor outcomes, performance and support all invoice and budget activities.  You will use data and reporting skills for invoice reconciliation and process invoices in Concur

• You will initially be assigned to support ODS, and in time you will be asked to support ad hoc duties as assigned, including expanding to other vendors/output types and specializing in a specific module of vendor management

Your Knowledge and Experience 

• Requires a BA/BS in Business, Finance, Economics, Public Health, or Information Technology, or equivalent experience
• Graduate degree (e.g. MBA) is highly desirable
• Requires 4 - 6 years of experience in Product Management or Management Consulting

• Requires expertise in managing transactional printed output (metadata file + source docs), with a preference for experience with EOBs, Checks, Bills, and Letter Systems such as SmartComms, MHK, Care Connect

• Requires knowledge of document transfer methodologies, such as IP Switch, SFTP, API, Sterling, MQMFT

• Requires vendor management competency in stakeholder management, risk management, vendor incident management, budget and invoice management, production management, contract management, regulatory contract filing 

• Experience with at least one of the following is required: ODS OneSuite, Smart Communications, Salesforce, MHK, or Pega platforms

• Requires experience with agile methodologies, Jira, Grid, Confluence, and enterprise reporting systems mandatory.

• Requires strong organizational and critical thinking skills, applied to all areas of the job, ability to manage overlapping priorities, ability to use email rules to manage over 200 emails a day, and the ability to problem solve and function independently without a desk level procedure

Hybrid

This role requires employees to be in-office based on our hybrid workplace model, balancing purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility. For most teams, this means coming into the office two days each week.

Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location will work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.

About Blue Shield of California

As of January 2025, Blue Shield of California became a subsidiary of Ascendiun. Ascendiun is a nonprofit corporate entity that is the parent to a family of organizations including Blue Shield of California and its subsidiary, Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan; Altais, a clinical services company; and Stellarus, a company designed to scale healthcare solutions. Together, these organizations are referred to as the Ascendiun Family of Companies. 

At Blue Shield of California, our mission is to create a healthcare system worthy of our family and friends and sustainably affordable. We are transforming health care in a way that genuinely serves our nonprofit mission by lowering costs, improving quality, and enhancing the member and physician experience. 

To achieve our mission, we foster an environment where all employees can thrive and contribute fully to address the needs of the various communities we serve. We are committed to creating and maintaining a supportive workplace that upholds our values and advances our goals.

Blue Shield is a U.S. News Best Company to work for, a Deloitte U.S. Best Managed Company and a Top 100 Inspiring Workplace. We were recognized by Fair360 as a Top Regional Company, and one of the 50 most community-minded companies in the United States by Points of Light. Here at Blue Shield, we strive to make a positive change across our industry and communities – join us!  

Our Values: 

• Honest. We hold ourselves to the highest ethical and integrity standards. We build trust by doing what we say we're going to do and by acknowledging and correcting where we fall short. 
• Human. We strive to listen and communicate effectively, showing empathy by understanding others' perspectives.
• Courageous. We stand up for what we believe in and are committed to the hard work necessary to achieve our ambitious goals. 

Physical Requirements:

Office Environment - roles involving part to full time schedule in Office Environment. Based in our physical offices and work from home office/deskwork - Activity level: Sedentary, frequency most of work day.

Please click here for further physical requirement detail. 

Equal Employment Opportunity:

External hires must pass a background check/drug screen. Qualified applicants with arrest records and/or conviction records will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with Federal, State and local laws, including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, protected veteran status or disability status and any other classification protected by Federal, State and local laws.