Product Manager III

About the Role

Digital Enterprise Technology (DET) is seeking a hands-on Senior Product Owner to support Time Tracking, Absence, and Benefits systems within the CIO organization. This temporary role is focused on execution and delivery. The Senior Product Owner will take business needs from initial intake through requirements, configuration coordination, testing, defect resolution, release, and post-production validation. The role requires someone who can quickly learn the current environment, work through an existing backlog, and independently move work to completion. This is a techno-functional position—not a purely strategic product role or a passive coordination role. The successful candidate will work directly with HR, Benefits, Payroll, Engineering, Compliance, vendors, and business teams to deliver accurate, practical solutions across Workday and connected systems.

What You Will Do

Requirements and Backlog Execution

• Gather and clarify requirements for Time Tracking, Absence, Leave, and Benefits enhancements and production issues.
• Translate business needs into detailed user stories, acceptance criteria, configuration requirements, workflow rules, and test scenarios.
• Document business rules involving time entry, approvals, overtime, accruals, leave eligibility, benefits eligibility, enrollment, and life events.
• Identify edge cases, regional variations, data requirements, and upstream or downstream impacts.
• Break work into sprint-ready items and ensure each item meets the team's Definition of Ready.
• Estimate effort and complexity in partnership with technical and functional teams.
• Maintain traceability between requirements, configuration decisions, and test cases.
• Keep backlog items, dependencies, decisions, and delivery status current in the team's work-tracking system.
• Participate actively in backlog refinement, sprint planning, standups, demonstrations, and retrospectives.

Configuration and Solution Delivery

• Perform or coordinate hands-on configuration in Workday Time Tracking, Absence, Benefits, and related HR applications.
• Configure and validate business processes, eligibility rules, accrual calculations, validation rules, notifications, approvals, and security assignments.
• Build and test changes in development or sandbox environments before production deployment.
• Evaluate configuration options and recommend practical solutions based on complexity, risk, timing, and business value.
• Review existing configurations and troubleshoot unexpected system behavior.
• Maintain configuration documentation, decision logs, mapping specifications, and operating procedures.
• Peer-review configurations produced by internal team members or service providers.
• Support Workday release preparation by reviewing applicable features, assessing impacts, completing regression testing, and coordinating required changes.

Testing, UAT, and Release Support

• Write and maintain test cases mapped to requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Execute functional, regression, integration, and end-to-end testing.
• Prepare test data and confirm that test environments are ready for use.
• Lead or support user acceptance testing, including test planning, scenario preparation, business-user guidance, and results tracking.
• Capture, triage, and resolve defects, then coordinate retesting through closure.
• Validate integrations with Payroll, Core HR, Finance, benefits carriers, leave administrators, and other third-party systems.
• Confirm that time, absence, and benefits transactions produce the expected downstream payroll and reporting results.
• Prepare release notes describing what changed, how it was tested, and any known impacts.
• Perform post-deployment smoke testing and production validation.

Production Support and Issue Resolution

• Investigate Time Tracking, Absence, and Benefits incidents and business escalations.
• Reproduce issues, analyze configuration and transaction data, identify root causes, and coordinate corrective action.
• Work directly with HR, Payroll, Benefits, Engineering, vendors, and managed service providers to resolve problems.
• Lead root-cause analysis for significant production issues and document findings, corrective actions, and preventive measures.
• Monitor open issues and ensure urgent or time-sensitive items continue moving toward resolution.
• Identify recurring problems and recommend configuration, process, or documentation improvements.
• Provide clear updates on issue status, business impact, dependencies, and expected resolution.
• Support operational activities when temporary coverage or additional delivery cap

Typical Day

• Work with business stakeholders to capture business requirements
• Work with the team to answer requirements questions, forecast start and completion dates for discovery, testing, and UAT
• Work with Technical Program Manager to report status weekly
• Attend team and program weekly ceremonies
• Create slides to share technical challenges, risks, proposed options, accomplishments, etc.

Required Skills

• Benefits experience
• Payroll experience
• Clear and concise communication
• Strong organization skills
• Quick onboarding ability
• Able to speak both technical and business language
• Requirements elicitation
• Process mapping
• Visualization of information
• Agile and Scrum knowledge - working directly with a scrum team
• Team leadership

Pay

$70/hr to $75/hr