Salesforce Product Owner

General Description
Responsible for defining and prioritizing the product backlog, ensuring the delivery of a valuable and high-quality product, and acting as a bridge between stakeholders and the development team. The Product Owner plays a pivotal role in the success of the project by understanding customer needs, creating a clear vision for the product, and making decisions that guide the development process.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Product Vision and Strategy: Develop and communicate a clear product vision and strategy that aligns with Churchill Down’s goals and customer needs. Continuously evaluate market trends and customer feedback to adjust the product strategy as needed.
• Backlog Management: Create, refine, and prioritize the product backlog, ensuring it reflects the highest-value items for development. Define and communicate user stories, epics, and acceptance criteria to guide the development team.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate with stakeholders, including customers, end-users, business leaders, and development teams, to gather and validate requirements. Act as the primary point of contact between stakeholders and the development team, ensuring clear communication and shared understanding.
• Solution Design and Execution: Develop user stories based on business requirements, reviewing with Development, QA, and other team members to ensure understanding and testability. Implement and apply Product management best practices across large, complex solutions. Analyze processes and systems, working closely with the development team to understand development requirements and identify areas for automation and improvement.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities (cont.)

• Release Planning: Plan and prioritize product releases, determining which features and enhancements will be included in each release. Balance business objectives, technical constraints, and customer needs to create a release schedule.
• Sprint Execution: Lead Agile ceremonies, including program increment planning, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint review, and sprint retrospective meetings. Clarify requirements and provide real-time feedback to the development team during sprints.
• Acceptance and Validation: Accept or reject work completed by the development team, ensuring that it meets the defined acceptance criteria and user expectations. Verify that the product increment delivered aligns with the product vision.

Education
Bachelor's Degree from an accredited University/College

Experience
Three (3) years of experience as Product Owner or similar role in Software Development Projects.

Certifications / Licenses
The following certifications and/or licenses are not required but, desirable:
Salesforce Certifications
Agile Certification
Scrum Master Certification
Kanban Certification

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Strong business acumen: ability to understand the needs and concerns of business stakeholders and colleagues and respond promptly and effectively to stakeholder requests. Ability to conduct analysis on work procedures, business results, and recommends changes to improve the effectiveness of the business's management.
• Communication skills: effectively interact with internal and external stakeholders. Ability to foster trusting relationships with colleagues and clients. Highly develop written and verbal communications skills. Presents numerical data effectively. Superior communication and interpersonal skills. Excellent report-writing and presentation skills. Polished in preparing presentations, executive summaries, and business reports in English for executive audiences.
• Analytical skills: Stays focused on main issues, prevents irrelevant issues or distractions from interfering with timely completion of assignments. Collects, research and complements data; Synthesizes complex or diverse information. Demonstrates attention to detail; Applies design principles; Generate creative solutions. Strong quantitative, research and analytical skills. Experience with data analysis, persuasive and informative writing, workload management, and process management.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities (cont.)

• Problem Solving: Identifies and resolves problems in a timely manner; Develops alternative solutions.
• Project Management: Ability to prioritize and work with multiple projects and tasks with minimum supervision; self-direct and task switch between strategic and tactical initiatives regularly. Capacity to achieve results according to plan ensuring the expected quality. Excellent organization capacity to define priorities, meet deadlines, and flexible to change. Knowledge on project coordination, identification of business needs, work plan, budget control, time management, resource allocation, team management and status reports. Must demonstrate leadership, logic, and reasoning skills.
• Operational/Regulations Processes: Knowledge on budget administration, resources allocation, organization’s policies, and regulations. Ability to establish, conduct and track operational processes properly.
• Computer and Technological Skills: Proficient in MS Office 365, Jira, and Salesforce.

Work Schedule
Onsite at Churchill Downs Racetrack, standard work week, times