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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Application Manager

💰 $ - $

ITApplication ManagementSoftwareOperationsCloud

🎯 Role Definition

An Application Manager is responsible for the operational ownership, strategy, and continuous improvement of one or more enterprise application portfolios (SaaS, cloud-hosted, or on-prem). This role partners with business stakeholders, IT teams, vendors and security/compliance functions to ensure application performance, availability, secure configuration, cost optimization, roadmaps, and timely delivery of enhancements under agreed SLAs and budgets. The Application Manager balances tactical incident/change management with strategic planning for lifecycle, integrations, and user adoption.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Business Systems Analyst with application ownership experience
  • IT Service Delivery / Operations Manager overseeing enterprise apps
  • Technical Product Owner or Application Support Lead

Advancement To:

  • Senior Application Portfolio Manager / Application Lead
  • IT Service Delivery Director or Head of Application Services
  • Product Manager (Enterprise Platforms) or IT Program Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Vendor & Partner Manager for SaaS platforms
  • Enterprise Architect focusing on application rationalization
  • IT Service Management (ITSM) Process Owner (e.g., Change, Incident, Problem)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own the end-to-end application lifecycle for assigned enterprise systems, including requirements intake, release planning, maintenance, upgrades, deprecation and end-of-life activities while ensuring alignment to business strategy.
  • Manage and prioritize the application backlog and roadmap in collaboration with business stakeholders, product owners and technical teams to deliver high-value features and minimize technical debt.
  • Lead SLA, OLA and KPI definition, tracking and continuous improvement efforts to ensure application availability, performance and customer satisfaction meet or exceed targets.
  • Serve as the single point of accountability for incidents and major outages for assigned applications, driving root cause analysis, corrective actions, communication plans and post-incident reviews.
  • Coordinate application change management processes, including CAB coordination, risk assessment, scheduling, rollback planning and coordination with infrastructure, security and network teams to minimize business disruption.
  • Own vendor relationships and contracts for third-party application providers and managed service partners, including commercial negotiations, performance reviews, escalation handling and vendor roadmaps alignment.
  • Define and manage application budgets, cost tracking and optimization activities (license management, cloud rightsizing, and consolidation opportunities) to maintain cost efficiency and forecast accuracy.
  • Ensure secure configuration, platform hardening and compliance of applications by partnering with information security and compliance teams for regular assessments, penetration testing remediation and audit response.
  • Lead cross-functional release management for application updates, coordinating development, QA, DevOps and business testing while validating release readiness and rollout plans.
  • Drive integration strategy and orchestration for enterprise applications, maintaining API contracts, middleware configurations and data flow documentation to ensure reliable system-to-system interactions.
  • Partner with business process owners to map processes to application functionality, identify automation and optimization opportunities, and champion user adoption and training programs.
  • Establish observability, monitoring and alerting standards for applications and act on proactive metrics to reduce incidents and improve MTTR (mean time to recovery).
  • Manage application configuration management database (CMDB) records, asset inventories, and dependencies to support change control, impact analysis and disaster recovery planning.
  • Develop and maintain runbooks, runbook automation and operational playbooks for common incidents, backups and maintenance tasks to reduce human error and accelerate response times.
  • Coordinate and validate disaster recovery and business continuity plans related to critical applications, including failover exercises, RTO/RPO validation and recovery documentation.
  • Drive continuous improvement by collecting business and support feedback, conducting post-release retrospectives and implementing improvements in processes, tools and automation.
  • Lead or participate in Agile ceremonies where the application team is a contributor, helping translate business needs into well-defined user stories and acceptance criteria.
  • Mentor and manage application support staff or SMEs, defining clear roles, escalation paths and career development plans for the application support team.
  • Conduct application health reviews and technical debt assessments with engineering partners to prioritize modernization, refactoring and migration initiatives (e.g., cloud migration, containerization).
  • Manage data governance considerations for applications including data classification, retention policies, encryption-at-rest/in-transit and data privacy requirements in coordination with legal and privacy teams.
  • Evaluate new technologies, modules, or partner solutions and produce business cases and TCO analyses to support executive investment decisions and strategic platform consolidation.
  • Ensure accessibility, localization and user experience improvements are included in roadmap planning to increase adoption and reduce support calls across global user bases.
  • Establish metrics-driven reporting to executive stakeholders providing transparent dashboards on availability, incidents, costs, feature delivery velocity and customer satisfaction.
  • Facilitate stakeholder governance forums (steering committees, monthly business reviews) to align priorities, dependencies, and to escalate critical cross-functional decisions.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Provide occasional support for training materials, user guides and release notes tailored to end users.
  • Assist in procurement and onboarding of SaaS solutions, including vendor security questionnaires and POC coordination.
  • Participate in compliance and audit preparations by producing application evidence and change logs.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Application lifecycle management and product/roadmap ownership for enterprise software (ERP, CRM, HCM, Financial Systems).
  • Strong working knowledge of ITIL processes: Incident, Problem, Change, Release and Configuration Management.
  • Cloud platform experience (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) including SaaS management and cloud cost governance.
  • Experience with integration platforms and APIs (REST, SOAP, middleware such as Mulesoft, Dell Boomi, Azure Logic Apps).
  • Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Splunk) and defining actionable alerts/SLAs.
  • Release and deployment tools knowledge (Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI/CD, Octopus Deploy) and basic understanding of build pipelines.
  • Vendor and contract management skills, including negotiating SLAs, SOWs and managing third-party performance metrics.
  • Security and compliance literacy: identity & access management (IAM), SSO (SAML/OAuth), encryption, GDPR, SOC 2 and penetration test remediation.
  • Proficiency with incident management and ticketing systems (ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, BMC Remedy).
  • Data governance and data integration fundamentals including ETL/ELT concepts, data mapping and data quality monitoring.
  • Financial acumen for budget management, licensing models, TCO, and cost optimization strategies.
  • Familiarity with Agile/Scrum frameworks and experience working with product owners and development teams.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management and communication skills with the ability to translate technical issues into business impact narratives.
  • Proven leadership and team development capabilities with experience mentoring technical and functional teams.
  • Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills for root cause analysis and risk mitigation.
  • Prioritization and decision-making under pressure during incidents and competing roadmaps.
  • Customer-focused mindset with an emphasis on continuous improvement and user adoption.
  • Negotiation and influence skills for aligning cross-functional teams and vendor partners.
  • Strong organizational skills to manage multiple applications, projects and deadlines concurrently.
  • Change leadership and facilitation skills for steering process and cultural adoption across teams.
  • High attention to detail for compliance, documentation and release validation.
  • Resilience and adaptability in fast-paced, evolving technical landscapes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in IT Management, Business Administration (MBA), or advanced technical certifications (e.g., PMP, ITIL 4, AWS/Azure certification).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Information Systems
  • Business Administration / Management Information Systems
  • Engineering
  • Data Management / Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5 to 10+ years of progressive experience in application support, application management, IT operations or product ownership roles.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years managing enterprise application portfolios with demonstrable experience in vendor management, SLA ownership, cloud migrations and cross-functional release management.
  • Experience working in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, insurance) or large-scale global enterprises is highly desirable.
  • Proven track record of leading cross-functional teams and delivering measurable improvements in availability, cost and user satisfaction.
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