Custom Service Manager Jobs in Kansas (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Black & Veatch is an employee-owned company focused on sustainable infrastructure and engineering solutions. They are seeking an experienced Product Manager responsible for the strategic ownership and performance of custom-built engineering applications, ensuring they meet the needs of engineering professionals and deliver business value.
Responsibilities:
• Own and evolve the portfolio intake process for custom and hybrid engineering applications, ensuring all requests are framed as customer or user problems, not solution requests.
• Establish clear intake criteria, qualification thresholds, and decision artifacts aligned to DPOM Opportunity Intake & Screening practices (e.g., problem statement clarity, user personas, value hypotheses, and risk)
• Partner with engineering, architecture, cybersecurity, and business leaders to shape demand early, reducing low‑value or duplicative requests before they enter delivery
• Design and operate a quantitative prioritization model for the application portfolio that balances: Business value and user impact, Risk reduction (security, reliability, compliance), Technical debt and sustainability, Strategic alignment to enterprise and digital priorities
• Use objective scoring, trade‑off analysis, and capacity‑aware planning to support fact‑based investment decisions and funding conversations
• Facilitate portfolio‑level reviews and decision forums as part of DPOM governance rituals
• Support application rationalization efforts to assess the current state across relevance, redundancy, fitness for purpose, and total cost of ownership.
• Define and socialize a target future‑state portfolio, including: Sunset, consolidate, modernize, or invest decisions, Migration paths to platforms, shared services, or products where appropriate
• Ensure rationalization decisions are anchored in measurable outcomes, not anecdotal preferences
• Establish authoritative visibility and control over the portfolio
• Own the ongoing sustainability, operations, and functionality of custom, customized, and COTS‑adjacent engineering applications across their full lifecycle
• Ensure applications remain reliable and performant, accounting for software version changes, data integrity, and updated business needs
• Make informed decisions related to data structures, data flow, 2D/3D model manipulation and upstream/ downstream integrations.
• Proactively manage technical debt, vendor dependencies, and platform constraints
• Partner closely with architecture, platform engineering, and cybersecurity teams to ensure that product roadmaps explicitly include investments that improve: Security posture and compliance, System reliability, resilience, and maintainability, Scalability and performance aligned to future demand
• Balance near‑term feature delivery with intentional investment in foundational quality as required by DPOM’s 'Secure, Resilient & Scalable' principle
• Define and own product success metrics (input and outcome metrics) aligned to the DPOM Success Metrics & Governance framework
• Establish regular operating rhythms (WBRs, portfolio reviews, roadmap checkpoints) where metrics, not anecdotes, drive decisions
• Create a culture where progress, performance, and trade‑offs are visible, trusted, and continuously refined, reinforcing accountability across teams
• Act as the single‑threaded owner for assigned products and portfolio segments, coordinating across engineering, UX, architecture, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders
• Coach teams and partners in product mindset vs. project mindset, reinforcing DPOM behaviors and expectations throughout the lifecycle
Qualifications:
Required:
• Strong understanding of engineering workflows, design data lifecycles, and operational intricacies of sustaining applications that enable engineering delivery.
• Ability to establish clear intake criteria, qualification thresholds, and decision artifacts aligned to DPOM Opportunity Intake & Screening practices.
• Experience in designing and operating a quantitative prioritization model for the application portfolio that balances business value and user impact, risk reduction, technical debt and sustainability, and strategic alignment to enterprise and digital priorities.
• Ability to facilitate portfolio‑level reviews and decision forums as part of DPOM governance rituals.
• Ability to support application rationalization efforts to assess the current state across relevance, redundancy, fitness for purpose, and total cost of ownership.
• Ability to define and socialize a target future‑state portfolio, including sunset, consolidate, modernize, or invest decisions.
• Ability to ensure rationalization decisions are anchored in measurable outcomes.
• Ability to establish authoritative visibility and control over the portfolio.
• Ability to own the ongoing sustainability, operations, and functionality of custom, customized, and COTS‑adjacent engineering applications across their full lifecycle.
• Ability to ensure applications remain reliable and performant, accounting for software version changes, data integrity, and updated business needs.
• Ability to proactively manage technical debt, vendor dependencies, and platform constraints.
• Ability to partner closely with architecture, platform engineering, and cybersecurity teams to ensure that product roadmaps explicitly include investments that improve security posture and compliance, system reliability, resilience, and maintainability, and scalability and performance aligned to future demand.
• Ability to balance near‑term feature delivery with intentional investment in foundational quality.
• Ability to define and own product success metrics aligned to the DPOM Success Metrics & Governance framework.
• Ability to establish regular operating rhythms where metrics drive decisions.
• Ability to create a culture where progress, performance, and trade‑offs are visible, trusted, and continuously refined.
• Ability to act as the single‑threaded owner for assigned products and portfolio segments, coordinating across engineering, UX, architecture, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders.
• Ability to coach teams and partners in product mindset vs. project mindset.
Preferred:
• 7+ years of experience in product management, digital platforms, or complex application portfolios, preferably in engineering, infrastructure, or asset-intensive environments.
• Demonstrated experience implementing structured intake, prioritization, and portfolio rationalization approaches.
• Strong analytical capability with experience designing quantitative prioritization and decision frameworks.
• Experience as a product manager for custom applications that support engineering delivery, including plugins, add-ons/bolt-ons, and COTS adjacent applications, such as Autodesk, Bentley/ProjectWise, SmartPlant or similar engineering design systems.
• Proven ability to define, operationalize, and use product performance metrics to drive outcomes.
• Demonstrable expertise in operating models and portfolio management; comfort with DPOM-like governance, measurable outcomes, and continuous improvement.
• Excellence in cross-functional leadership, stakeholder management, and clear communication with technical and business audiences.
• Track record of managing long-living, business-critical applications used daily, globally, by engineers, balancing business needs with stability, security, maintainability and operational risk.
• Proven ability to partner with Engineering, Security, Architecture, and AI leaders.
• Bachelor’s in Computer Science / Engineering or equivalent experience.
• Experience working within or implementing a product operating model (DPOM, SAFe, or equivalent).
• Familiarity with secure and scalable architecture, cloud platforms, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Experience modernizing legacy or bespoke engineering applications into sustainable, platform‑oriented solutions.
Company:
Black & Veatch is an engineering, consulting, and construction company. Founded in 1915, the company is headquartered in Overland Park, USA, with a team of 10001+ employees. The company is currently Late Stage.