Product Owner

About the role

This role is accountable for the development and product management of a service and/or analytic product within the organization, with a unique focus on the applicable business unit. The incumbent serves as the primary point of contact to agile, large cross-functional teams on behalf of the customer to identify product requirements for development. The role is accountable for the product’s ability to produce business value by translating strategy into agile execution, overseeing priority, scope, and validation of work required to deliver a quality product. The position requires a strong understanding of technology concepts and practices, a deep understanding of the product, the market, business strategy, and operating model, and alignment with product management leadership and direct stakeholder involvement to support the organization’s primary business objectives.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to streamlining the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of features or components for the team.
• Manage, understand, and support prioritized portfolio and value stream work by collaborating with stakeholders such as Solution Architect, Business Architect, Product Manager, and others to break down features into user stories.
• Act as a bridge between product and development teams by translating the product manager’s vision into business and functional requirements, enabling teams to focus on user outcomes.
• Serve as a key player in solution estimation.
• Maintain a well-groomed and prioritized backlog sufficient to support optimal team allocation for multiple (3+) sprints, including acceptance of stories and enforcing definition of ready and definition of done (backlog health). Recommend resolution paths to domain leadership when backlog health becomes insufficient.
• Responsible for accepting stories as “Done” from the team, ensuring stories have been developed, tested, and meet defined acceptance criteria.
• Collaborate with stakeholders (e.g., Product Management, business leads) in the creation, maintenance, and communication of the product vision, strategy, and roadmap. Represent the product in team or minor-level governance meetings and track and provide status to leadership.
• Perform work necessary with product managers to learn about the problems they aim to solve with the product.
• Collaborate with external vendors to align roadmaps, ensuring delivery execution and scope alignment.
• Work on cross-functional teams, leveraging agile program and team metrics to drive success.
• Accountable for technology product value; comprehends and consults with business regarding their value realization.
• Contribute to the generation of a high-level release plan with the team and continually reprioritize team tasks based on new information, discussions with stakeholders, and probability to drive business outcomes.
• Develop and maintain product delivery roadmap. Effectively communicate product release contents and expected product capabilities/behavior to stakeholders.
• Write clearly defined user stories for new product features, issues, and future enhancements. Work with the team to define and implement improvement stories that increase the quality of the program.
• Review, update, and sign off on test scripts for both in-track and regression testing, ensuring full coverage of the user stories.

Education

• Required: Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, Marketing, Healthcare Discipline, Information Management, or closely related field

Experience

• Required: 3 years of experience in Product Ownership, Strategic Consulting or Design Thinking OR in Product Development & Management, Project/Program Management
• Required: 3 years of experience working with external clients/fostering positive relationships and outcomes

Licenses or Certifications

• Preferred: Agile certification from a known vendor (Scrum.org, SAFe, Scrum Alliance, etc.)

Skills

• Demonstrated ability to work with external clients and foster positive relationships and outcomes
• Ability to consult with the technical team to translate business requirements into technical stories
• Proficiency in Agile methodology and software development
• Strong skills in prioritization, consultation, negotiation, and collaboration
• A keen understanding of the depth and breadth of business applications (upstream and downstream) and the ability to think broadly
• Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills; excellent interpersonal skills
• Strong cross-functional team collaboration and adaptability to change
• Strong understanding of the healthcare industry
• Exposure to supporting multiple products (within the same product area)

Preferred Skills

• 3 years of Agile delivery experience with a variety of methodologies
• Experience in Healthcare customer service platform or Appeals platform
• Experience in Pega technology
• Agile certification from a known vendor (Scrum.org, SAFe, Scrum Alliance, etc.)

Physical, Mental and Working Conditions

• Position Type: Office Based
• Teaches/trains others regularly
• Occasionally travels regularly from the office to various work sites or from site-to-site
• Rarely works primarily out-of-the-office selling products/services (sales employees)
• Physical work site required: No
• Lifting up to 10 pounds: Constantly
• Lifting 10 to 25 pounds: Occasionally
• Lifting 25 to 50 pounds: Never