Lead Product Owner (Associate Director)

Grant Thornton International is seeking a Lead Product Owner (Associate Director) to join the team in New York, NY. 

About Grant Thornton

Grant Thornton is one of the world’s leading professional services networks with member firms in over 145 countries, 75,000 people and global revenues of $8bn. Member firms offer audit, tax, and advisory services to privately owned companies, publicly listed companies, public sector and not for profit organisations, both domestically and internationally. 

Grant Thornton International Ltd (GTIL) is the umbrella legal entity for the Grant Thornton global network of member firms. GTIL sets the strategic direction, convenes member firms, connects global communities, and protects the brand and reputation of the network. GTIL and the member firms will continually improve the sustainability of their operations and strive to make a positive impact on clients, people, markets, and the communities in which we operate, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

About the role                                                

Overall role purpose The Lead Product Owner will play a pivotal role in leading the Leap Product Owner team.  The ideal candidate should have a strong background in product management, agile methodologies, sprint planning, requirements gathering, stakeholder management and leading a team of product owners.  Main responsibilities

Leadership:

• Coach, mentor and provide guidance to the Product Owner team.
• Collaborate with engineering, design, and member firm audit technology teams to understand project requirements and contribute to the overall success of the software development lifecycle.
• Provides expertise and solutions for complex initiatives and can make independent decisions.
• Facilitate communication between teams to define requirements, validate acceptance criteria, ensure test cases are appropriate, address product defects and ensure alignment with product goals for all features on the roadmap.
• Lead the product management team standup.

Roadmap

• Collaborate with the Product Manager to create the overall roadmap.
• Participate in roadmap planning activities to ensure identified features align with the overall product vision and guiding principles.
• Monitor and analyze execution of the roadmap and adjust sprint planning accordingly to meet the planned roadmap.
• Regularly review and align the roadmap with key stakeholders to ensure it meets business objectives and market demands.

Sprint Management

• Lead the execution of sprint planning activities to ensure that requirement sizes are received timely and allocated appropriately based on sprint capacity.
• Responsible for overseeing the completion of the sprint acceptance memo that highlights work completed, results of testing and impacts to identified defects.
• Collaborate with the Product Manager to ensure alignment of planned sprint requirements into releases to execute the overall roadmap.
• Conduct sprint or release retrospectives to identify areas of continuous improvement.

Troubleshooting

• Lead the triage of identified production issues or product defects to ensure appropriate ownership (e.g. product owner, support, development, cloud engineering, QA).
• Oversee resolution of issues/defects assigned to the Product Owner team.
• Coordinate and lead member firm response efforts, ensuring that all relevant teams are engaged and that critical incidents are resolved in a timely manner.
• Foster a culture of knowledge sharing within the team by documenting troubleshooting procedures and best practices

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Lead the product team in processes to gather, define, finalize and clearly document requirements and acceptance criteria for approved features on the product roadmap.
• Facilitate communication between teams to address challenges and ensure alignment with product goals.
• Collaborate with project stakeholders to create user journey documentation to ensure test plans meet business objectives.
• Partner with support and engineering teams to investigate issues and defects to resolution.
• Collaborate with QA Team on the execution of applicable testcase design and knowledge transfer of requirements.
• Oversee the execution of product owner led working groups t