Senior Product Owner (Hybrid - Raleigh, Jersey City, New York City)

Senior Product Owner

With a company culture rooted in collaboration, expertise and innovation, we aim to promote progress and inspire our clients, employees, investors and communities to achieve their greatest potential. Our work is the catalyst that helps others achieve their goals. In short, We Enable Possibility?.

The Senior Product Owner is the 'voice of the customer' within the Agile development team and is responsible for supporting the optimization of business outcomes and product development process on our digital transformation efforts. This role will own multiple product/team delivery roadmaps, manage relationships and stakeholder communications, maintain product strategy and business alignment in delivery team backlog and work to deliver results quickly. Senior Product Owner will represent the product/s working closely with Product Owner/s and coaching to ensure correct understanding of scope & translation to user stories. This role acts as the triangulation liaison and primary communication link between product manager, business/stakeholders and the Agile development team, ensuring the sprint deliverables aligns with business user needs and meets customer expectations within an agile framework.

This is a highly technical PO role requiring strong system-level fluencymust understand integrations, workflows, and IT concepts well enough to translate technical details into business outcomes while working closely with engineering teams. This role functions within the Middle Market Commercial and Entertainment sector of Arch Insurance IT.

Key Responsibilities

• Create, maintain, and prioritize multiple product backlog, ensuring items align with product vision and strategy to meet business objectives, and reflect evolving business needs and priorities aligned to business outcomes. Responsible for ensuring the backlogs content includes user stories, enablers and defects with work ready for the team to execute. Responsible for accepting stories while confirming the story meets approved standards, acceptance test and compiles with definition of done to ensure quality. Ensure the backlog supports architectural runway. Coach other Product Owners on backlog management.
• Ensure user stories are clear, concise, and well-defined to accurately represent the business need and fit with the product strategy with the clear direction and ability to facilitate development. Responsible for breaking down stories into small parts, clarifies details and ensures usability.
• Collaborate with the product management team to ensure the team is focused on the highest value work based on business needs, product strategy and/or initiative delivery and user feedback. Ensure the backlog reflects the vision and delivery roadmap, addresses solutions and delivery expectations. Responsible for ranking backlog items and ensuring proper sequence based on high value aligned with the product strategy.
• Provides coaching to Product Owners and acts as a bridge between product management and delivery teams. Facilitate communication and collaboration between the development team, designers, and other stakeholders.
• Collaborate with the domain product managers and development team to define sprint goals, select user stories, and facilitate sprint planning aligned with team capacity each sprint in line with the domain's priorities and strategy. Communicate with the agile delivery team on the vision during planning to prepare teams to execute and deliver solutions.
• Define clear acceptance criteria for each user story to ensure quality and delivery expectations are met.
• Collaborate with the team to plan and manage product releases in line with the domain's product and/or initiative delivery strategy as defined by the product manager. Facilitate frequent team conversations to resolve questions, manage dependencies and communicate emerging priorities as stories are implemented.
• Collaborate with the product managers to ensure the team is focused on the highest value work based on business needs, product strategy and/or initiative delivery and user feedback. Ensure the backlog reflects the vision and delivery roadmap addresses solutions and delivery expectations. Responsible for ranking backlog items and ensuring proper sequence based on high value aligned with the product strategy.
• Track and analyze key product metrics to measure success and identify areas for improvement. Regularly check progress toward meeting story acceptance criteria and ensure quality standards are met, like Definition of Done and nonfunctional requirements. Collaborates closely with the team to identify and fix quality issues.

Experience/Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in related field
• Certified Scrum Product Owner and/or SAFe POPM certification strongly preferred
• 8-10 years' prior experience in Insurance, Product Owner with IT development teams in Agile delivery & execution through software development lifecycle using Agile/Scrum/SAFe frameworks or related / relevant role(s)
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including the ability to influence and present complex, technical information to varying stakeholder groups, gather and provide feedback, and effectively engage with diverse teams across the organization
• Proven experience in playing a product owner role managing multiple products in the development of large scale commercial and specialty systems (DuckCreek, Guidewire, Unqork, UW Platforms, Submission & Clearance Systems, Extraction or AI-driven platforms etc.) and demonstrated value creation and business outcomes
• Ability to lead, partner and guide multiple Agile teams (Dev, QA, Design) and business teams in achieving product goals and resolving conflicts
• Experience developing productive relationships across the organization
• Ability to empathize with users and advocate for their needs as aligned with the domain's product strategy and ability to translate and articulate aligned user stories for execution with the development teams
• Advanced technical and business acumen knowledge to effectively articulate the business outcomes and priority and ability to translate into technical user stories for various development teams.
• Ability to convey complex, technical concepts to non-technical audiences
• Must demonstrate proficiency in Teamwork and Interpersonal Skills, Communication, Technical, Problem Solving, Continuous Improvement and Service Skills
• Self-starter demonstrating flexibility, accountability, and adaptability.
• Able to balance and drive progress against key domain deliverables across multiple development teams
• Proven experience Agile frameworks like Scrum and SAFe and tool such as JIRA, Confluence, MIRO and other product management and roadmap tools
• Deep understanding of commercial and specialty insurance product lifecycle