Senior Product Owner

Job Summary:

The Product Owner is responsible for guiding the development and delivery of product features across the entire product lifecycle. They act as a bridge between the business stakeholders and the development team, ensuring that the product meets customer needs and delivers value. The Product Owner is a crucial role in Agile development methodologies such as Scrum and Safe. 

Key Responsibilities:

Translation: Work with the lead Product Manager and/or senior leader to translate future vision and requirements into clearly broken down epics and stories.  Ensure that all team members understand and align with the product's goals.

Prioritization: Create and maintain the product backlog, a prioritized list of features, user stories, and tasks. Prioritize items based on business value, customer needs, and market trends.

User Story Development: Break down high-level product requirements into detailed user stories that can be understood and implemented by the development team. Ensure these stories are ready for implementation and meet strong agile/SAFE standards.

Backlog Management: Continuously groom and refine the product backlog with the team, making adjustments based on feedback, changing priorities, and new insights.

Stakeholder Communication: Act as the primary point of contact between the development team and stakeholders. Communicate progress, changes, and updates regularly to both groups.

Acceptance Criteria: Define acceptance criteria for user stories to ensure that the development team understands what constitutes a complete and well-implemented feature.

Sprint Planning: Participate in sprint planning meetings to select user stories and tasks for the upcoming sprint. Work with the team to ensure they have a clear understanding of the work to be done.

Release Planning: Collaborate with the team and stakeholders to plan and prioritize releases, considering market needs and business goals.

Quality Assurance: Ensure the product meets quality standards by accepting or rejecting the work done by the development team during sprint reviews.

Feedback Integration: Gather feedback from stakeholders and end-users, incorporate it into the product backlog, and make adjustments as necessary.

Escalation Management: Work with the customer success and support teams to understand and prioritize outstanding bugs and issues in upcoming sprints. 

Risk Management: Identify and mitigate risks that could impact product development or delivery.  This includes working closely with your release manager to ensure timelines are met, tough conversations are had, mitigation strategies are put into place, and transparency is taken to leadership for assistance when needed. 

UI/UX alignment:  work with your UX counterpart to ensure new features in the backlog have wireframes and UI designs ready to go as a critical step in sprint planning.  This includes providing feedback on the designs and working with the UI team on design sprints as well as user acceptance testing. 

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g., business, computer science) or equivalent work experience.
• 6+ years of experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• 4+ years of experience in Product Management or as a Product Owner.
• Experience with JIRA or other similar tools.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Strong organizational and time management skills.
• Presentation skills.

Preferred:

• Understanding of the industries that company operates in (manufacturing, utilities, oil & gas, chemicals, mining, pharmaceuticals, retail, etc.)
• Experience working on enterprise B2B products.
• Experience of document management applications would be a benefit.
• Understanding of CAD design practices.
• Professional Certifications (optional):
• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
• Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)

The Product Owner plays a critical role in ensuring that a product or feature is developed with a focus on delivering value to the customer and the business. They act as a voice for the customer and are responsible for making key product-related decisions throughout the development process.