Product Owner

We are partnered with a leader in the insurance industry who is seeking a dynamic Product Owner to join their Project Management Office (PMO). This position works with business, technical and vendor partners to ensure successful delivery of key corporate workstreams by identifying business value for feature delivery and driving a prioritized backlog for software development and business process improvements. The Product Owner will be responsible for managing a product backlog in an agile manner ensuring planned work translates the stakeholder needs into actionable features for execution.

Responsibilities

• Drive value by working closely with stakeholders to align product goals to the overall organizational strategies
• Create and maintain a prioritized product backlog in collaboration with team members for feature delivery, including definition of value, function, security, scheduling, user interface, and testing needs
• Champion product goals as part of the Project Management Office (PMO) to identify and document well-defined Epics, Features, PBIs (Product Backlog Items) and tasks in support of an agile software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Act as a conduit between business focused and technically focused teams to ensure the solutions identified are understood and meet the business requirements identified while adhering to the technical standards of the organization
• Partner closely with cross-functional teams to drive product strategy and vision, define requirements, and guide the team through the development process.
• Use agile methodologies such as user stories to drive out functional needs and acceptance criteria in a product-focused team environment
• Be the voice of the customer within the agile development team, and foster clear, bi-directional communication between stakeholders and the agile core team
• Work with sponsors and the product team to identify and document a clear roadmap of features which aligns to both the business and technical teams goals
• Break down large work items into logical Epics, Features and Product Backlog Items (PBIs) for planned execution based upon capacity
• Identify and document business needs through elicitation of requirements using various techniques, including interviews, document analysis, and transforming those requirements from Epics to Features and lower level PBIs and / or user stories
• Write requirements specifications using natural language simply, clearly, unambiguously, and concisely
• Lead communication efforts to regularly review, verify, and validate a backlog of features and PBIs including priority, requirements and specifications associated with business rules to key project stakeholders including software developers
• Facilitate agile ceremonies such as increment and sprint planning, sprint refinements, retrospectives, and daily standups
• Coordinate with the team members to provide clear and accurate status updates for requirements, and partner with Quality Assurance team to ensure testing coverage for requirements through system and user acceptance testing
• Follow change management practices to maintain requirement baselines and ensure that changes are approved, clearly communicated, and kept up to date
• Distinguish presented user requests from the true underlying needs and abstract up from detailed information to a more general understanding
• May be required to perform other functions within the agile team as assigned or necessary (all hands on deck approach)

Qualifications

Certifications required / preferred