Product Owner

We are partnered with a leader in oral health and dental insurance, seeking a dynamic Product Owner to join their Project Management Office (PMO). This position works with business, technical and vendors partners to ensure successful delivery of key corporate workstreams by identifying business value for feature delivery and driving a prioritized backlog for software development and business process improvements. The Product Owner will be responsible for managing a product backlog in an agile manner ensuring planned work translates the stakeholder needs into actionable features for execution.

Responsibilities

• Drive value by working closely with stakeholders to align product goals to the overall organizational strategies
• Create and maintain a prioritized product backlog in collaboration with team members for feature delivery, including definition of value, function, security, scheduling, user interface, and testing needs
• Champion product goals as part of the Project Management Office (PMO) to identify and document well-defined Epics, Features, PBIs (Product Backlog Items) and tasks in support of an agile software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Act as a conduit between business focused and technically focused teams to ensure the solutions identified are understood and meet the business requirements identified while adhering to the technical standards of the organization
• Use agile methodologies such as user stories to drive out functional needs and acceptance criteria in a product-focused team environment
• Be the voice of the customer within the agile development team, and foster clear, bi-directional communication between stakeholders and the agile core team
• Work with sponsors and the product team to identify and document a clear roadmap of features which aligns to both the business and technical teams goals
• Break down large work items into logical Epics, Features and Product Backlog Items (PBIs) for planned execution based upon capacity
• Identify and document business needs through elicitation of requirements using various techniques, including interviews, document analysis, and transforming those requirements from Epics to Features and lower level PBIs and/or user stories
• Write requirements specifications using natural language simply, clearly, unambiguously, and concisely
• Lead communication efforts to regularly review, verify, and validate a backlog of features and PBIs including priority, requirements and specifications associated with business rules to key project stakeholders including software developers
• Facilitate agile ceremonies such as increment and sprint planning, sprint refinements, retrospectives, and daily standups
• Coordinate with the team members to provide clear and accurate status updates for requirements, and partner with Quality Assurance team to ensure testing coverage for requirements through system and user acceptance testing
• Follow change management practices to maintain requirement baselines and ensure that changes are approved, clearly communicated, and kept up to date
• Distinguish presented user requests from the true underlying needs and abstract up from detailed information to a more general understanding
• May be required to perform other functions within the agile team as assigned or necessary (all hands on deck approach)

Qualifications

• 3-5 years of experience or prior knowledge/experience with an organization utilizing similar process and procedures
• Experience with software development as a product in either a previous Product Owner role capacity or like capacity (Business Analyst)
• Knowledge and familiarity with both formal Agile (Scrum, XP, SAFe) and traditional waterfall methodologies is absolutely required
• Excellent oral and written communication using clear, natural language to effectively communicate with internal and external customers, development, testing, and infrastructure teams
• Listening skills, team player skills, collaborations and working effectively within a team and at times leading the team
• Ability to organize and prioritize information effectively to cope with ambiguity and change
• Interpersonal skills, to help negotiate priorities and to resolve conflicts among project stakeholders (such as customers, project management, senior team, testers)
• Team oriented
• Strong customer experience orientation
• Self-starting drive to develop understanding of the business as well as professional business analysis skill set, aligned with Project Management best practices
• Experience in leading discussions with stakeholders of various levels in a confident, professional manner
• The ability to find creative solutions to business problems through identifying changes to business processes, systems, or workflows
• Proficiency with Agile methodology
• Prior experience with a formal requirements/development SDLC management software solution and test management suite is preferred such as Microsoft’s Azure DevOps, Jira or other
• A strong understanding of the fundamentals of IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysts) required
• Bachelor’s Degree and/or experience noted above

Certifications required/preferred

PMI ACP, PMI PMP, IIBA CBAP or SAFe certifications all considered pluses for the position.