The Product Owner works on a cross functional team to create meaningful and simple experiences for their product’s customers. They own the direction-setting, discovery, and prioritization of customer wants and needs. A PO-I typically is new to the role of Product Owner, and as such likely manages products with limited scope and impact.
The Product Owner role is highly collaborative working closely with several key partners. The Product Owner articulates, translates, and executes the Product Manager’s long-term strategy and vision of the product through tactical strategies and solutions to drive necessary business outcomes. This requires the right alignment and regular, transparent communication to ensure both roles deliver on their goals.
Additionally, the Product Owner works closely with stakeholders, end users, and functional and technical team members to rapidly deliver quality solutions to customers.
DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES:
Demonstrates a strong understanding of core product fundamentals, including product definition, customer personas, value proposition, and roadmap development.Collaborates with the Product Manager to decompose strategic initiatives from product roadmap into Epics, Features and user stories, ensuring it reflects both short-term deliverables and long-term vision.Collaborates with customers and stakeholders to refine product features, user stories, and acceptance criteria while identifying and managing impacts and dependencies.Partners with development and scrum teams, to prioritize and maintain the product backlog ensuring all prioritized work is clearly tied to business value.Build trusting partnerships with stakeholders, establishing continuous feedback loops to ensure evolving needs are met in alignment with strategic goalsMaintains awareness of market trends and engages with customers and technical teams to evolve the product in alignment with strategic priorities.Acquires and applies advanced knowledge of how the product integrates within the broader organizational ecosystem, including related business processes and experiences.Exhibits resilience and a problem-solving mindset, embracing ambiguity and overcoming obstacles to achieve product and organizational goals.Facilitates cross-team collaboration to identify interdependencies and align product roadmaps and sprint plans across multiple teams.Partners with Scrum Masters to plan and execute agile ceremonies, including sprint planning, reviews, product demos, and retrospectives.Ensures delivered solutions are aligned with key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure product effectiveness, and to communicate these metrics regularly to stakeholders and business leaders.Maintains visibility into team progress toward sprint goals and prioritized features and collaborates with Scrum Masters to communicate changes in priorities, status updates, risks, escalations, and accomplishments to both leadership and development teams.No direct personnel supervisory responsibility, however, supervises large complex product teams with cross-functional team members.
QUALIFICATIONS & SKILLS:
Required:
Bachelor’s degree in business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; master’s degree preferred.5+ years of experience in product ownership or product management in a technical space.Deep understanding of agile methodologies and experience leading agile teams.Strong knowledge of product lifecycle management, including product definition, customer personas, value proposition, and roadmap development.Experience with backlog management tools (e.g., Jira, Azure DevOps) and agile planning ceremonies.Ability to translate strategic initiatives into actionable features and user stories with clear business value.Ability to prioritize work against enterprise, division, and product strategies. Can effectively communicate rationale and impact for prioritization choicesExperience developing and tracking KPIs to measure product performance and discovery effectiveness.Excellent communication, collaboration, and influence skills among all organizational levels; strong facilitation and executive communications skillsPreferred:
Experience working on MainframesDemonstrated ability to understand and assess the current state of legacy systems, including their architecture, dependencies, and limitations, to inform modernization strategies and integration planning.Strong leadership skills to coordinate and motivate product teams, even outside direct reporting relationshipsDemonstrated experience with user interface design and best practices for usabilityExperience working in large, complex organizational initiativesAdvanced skills in MS Office Suite with particular emphasis on Excel and PowerPointPay Transparency
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