Product Owner I

Summary of Position:

Product Owner I will be a key driver in our agile product development process. The Product Owner I involves translating customer needs into actionable requirements, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and ensuring successful product delivery.

Essential Functions:

• Build trusted partnerships with internal stakeholders (executives, sales, marketing, operations)
• Learn the stakeholder’s “rhythm of business” by understanding their goals, challenges, and operational patterns
• Collect business requirements for project requests, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives
• Assist Product Managers in building technology product roadmaps, prioritizing features and enhancements based on customer needs and business value
• Collaborate with stakeholders to break down project requirements into high-level epics that represent major product features or initiatives
• Decompose agile Epics into smaller, actionable user stories with acceptance criteria that development can execute against
• Balance trade-offs between features, time-to-market, and resource constraints
• Develop UI mock-ups to illustrate and ensure user experiences or workflows are optimized for technology projects
• Support stakeholder project status and prioritization meetings with other product management team members
• Provide regular project status and roadmap updates to key stakeholders and product management leadership
• Support internal re-platforming and enterprise integration project requirement definition
• Collaborate with SCRUM teams to ensure successful delivery through collaboration with product managers, scrum masters, and development teams to ensure a well-prepared backlog
• Regularly engage in backlog refinement sessions with scrum teams
• Prioritize and refine user stories based on business value, feedback, changing requirements, and market dynamics
• Collaborate with engineering and enterprise architecture teams to ensure solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned with architectural best practices
• Actively pursue industry certification
• Accountable for success including measurement, timeline, scope
• Empowered to make all critical decisions regarding functionality and priority

 Competencies:

1. Ensures Accountability
2. Tech Savvy
3. Communicates Effectively
4. Values Differences
5. Customer Focus
6. Resourcefulness
7. Drives Results
8. Plans and Prioritizes
9. Decision Quality
10. Self-Development

Work Environment:

This job operates in a professional office environment. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers, filing cabinets and fax machines.

Physical Demands:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job.

 While performing the duties of this job, the employee in this position frequently communicates with other co-workers/clients who have inquiries about the various projects and other needs.  Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations.  The employee must be able to remain in a stationary position 75% of the time.  The employee in this position needs to occasionally move about inside the office to access file cabinets, office machinery, etc.  Constantly operate a computer and office machinery such as a calculator, keyboard, copy machine and printer.  Frequently moves boxes with equipment weighing up to 25lbs across the building and/or to other offsite buildings for various project needs.

Required Education and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Technology or Business; or equivalent work experience 
• 5+ years of experience

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Technology or Business; or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years in a program or product ownership space or equivalent role that was focused on customer requirement definition or business analysis activities
• 1-3 years in an Agile development environment developing customer requirements and user stories
• Possess a high degree of knowledge and understanding of computer systems, programming, and software testing
• ITQSB Qualified
• Solid understanding of common Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC) methodologies, including Waterfall and Agile/SCRUM
• Ability to work independently and make sound discretionary judgments
• Ability to analyze and solve complex problems quickly and creatively
• Excellent oral, written, and interpersonal communication skills. Additionally, the role requires a proven ability to read and understand te