FRFS Retail Product Owner

Company

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

When you join the Federal Reserve – The nation’s central bank – you’ll play a key role, collaborating with leading tech professionals to strengthen and protect our economic, financial and payments systems. We dedicate more than $1 billion to technology each year to support the Federal Reserve and our economy, and we’re building a dynamic and diverse team for our future. Bring your passion and expertise, and we’ll provide the opportunities that will challenge you and propel your growth – along with a wide range of benefits and perks that support your health, wealth, and life.****

Federal Reserve Financial Services (FRFS) delivers a suite of payments services to financial institutions via FedLine® Solutions, Fedwire®, National Settlement Service (NSS), FedCash®, FedACH® (Automated Clearing House), Check Services, and the FedNow® Service. In 2020, we undertook a strategic effort to transform FRFS from a product and support office framework to a national, enterprise-focused organization. The enterprise structure integrated the prior retail, wholesale, cash, and customer relations product and support offices into a new organization, which was further joined by the FedNow team in early 2024. Our North Star strategy, with the new structure, is to offer a fully integrated product suite that provides speed, resilience, and choice in meeting the payments needs of financial institutions across the United States. Through our evolved structure, we will meet the needs of the marketplace for new products and services more quickly, seek to provide a more robust and unified customer experience across our financial service offerings, and create new career growth opportunities for FRFS staff.

We are seeking leaders to set the vision, strategy, values, and priorities that enable FRFS to achieve its mission. Our leaders must demonstrate a strategic, action-oriented mindset focused on intellectual curiosity, agility, accountability, and the ability to drive innovation through experimentation. To achieve our vision for a people-focused organization with a strong collaborative and innovative culture, we expect our leaders to champion an inclusive environment and demonstrate our values in how we work and interact with each other and our broader community.

The Federal Reserve Financial Services (FRFS) Technical Payment Systems organization (FRFS) is responsible for software development, quality assurance testing, and day-to-day production operations of a payment product suite which includes Fedwire, Securities, FedACH (Automated Clearinghouse), Check, FedCash, and Fedline products. In this role the FRFS, in consultation with other System stakeholders, helps to set the strategic direction for US central bank payment services, coordinates product enhancements impacting the services and their customers, and ensures that operating sites meet service level agreements for resiliency and performance.

As a Product Owner for a portion of the FedACH and Check systems, the Product Owner is aligned with the Lead Product Owner & Business Product Management and understands the product vision, goals, and roadmap. They translate business wants and needs into a prioritized set of requirements by conducting business process analysis, needs assessments, and preliminary cost/benefits analyses to align with a robust information technology roadmap. They manage and prioritize the team’s backlog accordingly and lead their respective Agile team in delivering most important customer/stakeholder outcomes. Product Owners may also prepare functional, system and program specifications and assist in implementation of systems, as well as participate in System initiatives and/or workgroups.

Key Activities:

• A successful candidate will be a leader with experience operating in complex organizations and delivering well supported solutions. The Product Owner must:

• Continuously learn about the customer, their business needs, and contribution of the product to their desired outcomes

• Work with the Lead Product Owner and Product Management to communicate, re-enforce the vision, goals, and product roadmap, in the form of features/stories with the Agile team.

• Possess enough business and technical knowledge about the product to engage in team discussions.

• Work closely with architecture, engineering, and quality assurance to ensure the right customer problem is solved.

• Communicate with both technical and business stakeholders to understand and gather requirements and translate into technical specification when necessary.

• Decompose and prioritize epics/features into user stories and define detailed test acceptance criteria.

• Ensure technology-driven and risk-remediation requirements are prioritized to prevent the accumul