Federal Reserve Financial Services - Senior Product Owner

Company

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

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.

We value the diversity of our people, ideas, and experiences and are committed to building an inclusive culture that is representative of the communities we serve.

We are a dynamic hybrid workplace environment that requires at least 2 days a week in the office.

Position Summary:

The Product Owner (PO) will be organizationally aligned with the Fedwire Funds business line supporting Product Management and is a member of the technology solution delivery teams. Product Owners 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. A successful candidate will be a leader with experience operating in complex organizations and delivering well supported solutions

Key Responsibilities:

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 accumulation of technical debt and other vulnerabilities.
• Support the team as a subject matter expert representing the business and clarify any arising questions from the agile team.
• Support application development with enabler stories.
• Determine if the work done to complete a story met success criteria and accepts when satisfied.
• Assist in the analysis of defects and enhancements to determine severity and priority as well as overall validity.
• Contribute to discussions on risks, dependencies, issues, and schedule updates as needed.
• Ensures agreement on actions to address dependencies between broader FRFS teams
• Present working software to stakeholders at team and system demos.
• Prepare innovative product proposals and messaging for product forums; present to Group-level governance forums
• Utilize data and feedback to make informed decisions and continuously improve the product.
• Actively monitor product-specific OKRs and manag