Product Owner

About the role

As our Product Owner, you'll play a key role in shaping the future of lending technology at FCS Financial. You'll serve as the bridge between business and technology, partnering with stakeholders across lending, risk, compliance, and technology to deliver solutions that drive efficiency, support growth, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Responsibilities

• Define and manage the product roadmap, vision, and priorities for your product area.
• Partner with business leaders and stakeholders to identify opportunities, solve challenges, and deliver meaningful outcomes.
• Translate business needs, regulatory requirements, and market insights into actionable product features and priorities.
• Collaborate with various development teams to drive successful product delivery.
• Support user acceptance testing, release readiness, training, and adoption efforts.
• Incorporate risk, compliance, and operational requirements into product decisions.
• Leverage data, user feedback, and business insights to continuously improve product performance and value.
• Own product feature definition and roadmap execution for an assigned product area, informed by stakeholder needs, business priorities, and market dynamics.
• Facilitate discovery and product definition activities, including stakeholder interviews, user feedback sessions, and journey exploration to identify problems, pain points, and intended outcomes.
• Map and refine user journeys to identify improvement opportunities and inform feature design and prioritization.
• Define epics and user stories with clear, testable acceptance criteria to guide delivery.
• Establish expected business outcomes and success measures for product features and enhancements.
• Incorporate insights from market, vendor, and ecosystem trends into actionable product and roadmap options.
• Evaluate, prioritize, and sequence capabilities using structured, transparent approaches that balance value, risk, effort, dependencies, and timing.
• Ensure regulatory, risk, and ICFR considerations are incorporated into product definition and prioritization.
• Partner with Delivery and stakeholders to assess vendor roadmap items, releases, and upgrades for business impact and operational readiness.
• Define business readiness expectations for releases, including documentation, knowledge transfer, and Service Desk enablement.
• Partner with stakeholders to understand needs, define priorities, and align on intended outcomes.
• Facilitate decision-making and trade-off discussions; document decisions, owners, and timelines.
• Communicate roadmap and delivery status, risks, and dependency impacts to appropriate audiences.
• Incorporate operational feedback (e.g., issues, trends, root causes) into product priorities.
• Contribute to user enablement and adoption readiness for releases, including training coordination, communications, and rollout planning in partnership with stakeholders and Delivery.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies to clarify intent, priorities, and acceptance criteria during delivery.
• Ensure priorities consider end-to-end customer and employee journeys and cross-system impacts.
• Partner with delivery teams and shared services (engineering, QA, architecture, integration, platform teams) to align on scope, sequencing, and dependencies.
• Accept completed work against defined acceptance criteria and support business and control sign-offs.
• Support UAT planning and defect triage in partnership with stakeholders and Delivery.
• Coordinate deployment readiness and release execution activities in partnership with Delivery teams.
• Partner with application development and technical operations teams to evaluate technical trade-offs and scalability considerations.
• Ensure product decisions consider system performance, reliability, and technical debt implications.
• Incorporate applicable policy, regulatory, and control requirements into product priorities and acceptance criteria.
• Partner with Compliance, Security, Risk, and Audit stakeholders to support governance and readiness needs.
• Ensure appropriate documentation, approvals, and traceability are maintained for product releases.
• Support remediation of findings, issues, or control gaps related to the product area.
• Use operational, audit, and incident insights to inform product improvements.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Finance, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• Three or more years of Product Owner or Product Management experience within the lending lifecycle.
• Strong understanding of lending lifecycle processes and credit operations.
• Experience with vendor-supported SaaS or loan origination/CRM platforms.
• Ability to translate business needs, regulatory requirements, and technical capabilities into prioritized backlogs.
• Experience delivering outcomes on vendor-supported SaaS, configuration-heavy platforms (e.g., CRM/loan origination platforms such as nCino/Salesforce (preferred, not required)), including rules/workflow/permissions configuration, coordinating impacts across integrated platforms, and managing dependencies through release governance.
• Experience participating in vendor and platform run-cost decisions (e.g., licensing, renewals, support models), including basic TCO analysis and cost/value trade-offs.
• Familiarity with financial institution risk management, audit/exam processes, and control documentation through prior participation or exposure.
• Working knowledge of lending lifecycle process and practices.

Skills

• Strong analytical, facilitation, relationship management, and influence skills to drive decisions across business and technical stakeholders with clear oral and written communication.
• Ability to translate complex data concepts into business-friendly insights.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously and meet deadlines.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation: $80,000 – $130,000 plus incentive tied to Association performance.
• Comprehensive benefits designed to support your health, financial well-being, and work-life balance.
• Hybrid work environment with flexible options available within FCS Financial’s Branch locations in Missouri.
• Opportunities to lead strategic initiatives, influence product direction, and expand your leadership capabilities.
• Collaborative culture that values innovation, partnership, continuous improvement, and employee development.

Preferred office location in Jefferson City, Missouri. Other FCS Financial branch locations will be considered. Candidates must reside in Missouri to be considered for this position. This position is classified as Exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act.