Job Description
The Senior Technical Product Owner identifies, defines, analyzes, prioritizes, and refines business requirements, and communicates those requirements to the Scrum development teams. They are the voice of the customer, stakeholder and end user in product development decisions, aligning feature and product requests with business value. The Senior Technical Product Owner works directly with various internal and external stakeholders, as well as with the Scrum teams to ensure successful translation of requirements into high-quality software.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES and RESPONSIBILITIES
· Collaborate with key stakeholders across the organization to define, develop, shape, and refine requirements of complex software products at the heart of the company's business.
· Author requirements and user stories for product features, ensuring that stakeholder and market needs are met.
· Be a champion of user experience and define and execute user stories that ensure superior customer experience (both internal and external) when using feature/product.
· Define, prioritize, and clarify user stories; working with peer group and business SMEs to understand use cases, features, business & technical domain rules and overall product goals.
· Drive and own backlog management; groom backlog of competing requests by evaluating the business value and/or ROI of each, and prioritizing the scrum team's work.
· Accountable for managing scrum team's product backlog, sequencing into sprints, and ensuring that the development team is working on requests in the right order.
· Maintain the functional quality of the work being delivered by setting and evaluating expectations and acceptance criteria.
· Use agile/scrum methodologies to drive and deliver product releases.
· Understand the end user and ensure customer needs are captured in the user stories (and use cases) that drive the work of scrum teams.
· Interact side by side with customers and stakeholders, finding what problems and pain points they deal with on a day-to-day basis.
· Document customer needs in the form of user stories, and work with development teams devising innovative solutions that solve the customer and stakeholder problems. ·
Provide sprint goal and tactical objectives to scrum team, and provide quick JIT decisions to system level questions and defect triage.
· Collaborate with and provide advice and guidance to the development and test representatives throughout the development life cycle by providing functional and domain level expertise, as required, to complete test plans, test cases, data gathering, and other activities to complete testing.
· Run successful Release Planning and Sprint Planning sessions, as well as Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives.
· Work collaboratively across all functional departments within IT and in the business and drive communications regarding sprint plan including new features and defects to internal and external stakeholders.
· Ensure that prioritized solutions are delivered in a timely manner.
· Ensure that proposed solution concepts are aligned with the existing enterprise framework solution, business roadmap and objectives, and the IT product management roadmap.
· Strategize with product management and stakeholders on issues related to product requests, vision, and overall business.
· Assist with design of future state business processes, and act as a catalyst for change in adoption of the future state business processes.
· Challenge assumptions and direction from business stakeholders when their needs are not technically achievable; provide guidance.
· Understand and advocate best practices in high-level system designs.
· Research and understand market requirements and trends; study competitive offerings in the market and anticipate customer needs.
· Provide work direction and deliverable oversight to ensure tasks are completed with the required level of quality.
· Manage all communication needs as primary point of contact for initiatives falling under assigned business area(s).
· Lead, direct, and motivate functional teams in delivering new features.
· Assist other team members, scrum development team, and enterprise architecture in developing solution delivery best practices.
· Work with teams to continuously improve product ownership and other agile processes.
Requirements
· Bachelor's degree in business management, computer science, information technology, or equivalent education and work experience.
· 5 years' experience as an Agile Scrum Product Owner or similar roles.
· 4 years Scrum experience. · Strong knowledge/experience in agile development practices (especially Scrum and/or Kanban), methodologies and tools. ·
Certified Product Owner (CPO) or similar qualification in product ownership or analysis is desirable · Health Insurance industry experience is desirable
· Experience with distributed (off-site and/or off-shore) product & development teams
· Strong experience in Microsoft Office Suite (Excel, PowerPoint, Word)
· Experience in accessing and analyzing data with tools such as SQL.
· Expertise with collaboration tools such as Jira and Confluence · Ability to understand and abstract complex systems from technical descriptions ·
Ability to understand complex business and technical issues
· Ability to manage multiple projects and priorities simultaneously
· Excellent understanding of planning, analysis and testing approaches required to support distributed application development
· Energetic, Mission-driven, Results- and Detail-oriented
· Self-disciplined and diligent worker
· Mature interpersonal skills with proven ability to interact with diverse audiences (internal & external)
· Outstanding organizational skills, especially the ability to manage multiple concurrent priorities being executed by multiple teams
· Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, as well as negotiation and planning skills
· High level of business management and facilitation skills ·
Mastery of influence decision making without formal reporting structure authority
· Outstanding technical and non-technical communication skills
· Proven Problem Solving/Analytical skills; capability to resolve complex problems with minimum confusion, frustration, and inconveniences for all parties concerned
· Superb critical analytical/thinking skills
· Proven Decision Making skills
· Delivering results and meeting customer expectations
· Applying expertise and technology; Strong technical aptitude
· Demonstrated ability to help the organization fundamentally rethink how it executes business with successful outcome · Required to attend additional training as requested/deemed necessary
We are an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment including the decision to hire, promote, discipline, or discharge, will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, citizenship/ immigration status, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.