Product Owner

Purpose of Position

The Product Lead is the IT-side owner of delivery-ready product execution for their assigned domain. Embedded within engineering teams and partnering daily with the Delivery Lead, this role bridges business intent and delivery execution – ensuring that what teams build is well-defined, well-refined, and aligned to the value the Product Manager has articulated.

Tasks And Responsibilities

• Own backlog management for assigned delivery teams within the scope of approved epics, sequencing and maintaining a healthy pipeline of ready work
• Make tactical prioritization decisions about story ordering, dependency sequencing, and sprint content in partnership with the Delivery Lead and engineering teams
• Balance competing demands within the backlog – features, enhancements, technical debt, and production support – to maximize value delivery
• Communicate backlog priorities and rationale to delivery teams, ensuring engineers understand not just what they are building but why
• Receive epic-level handoffs from the Product Manager and own decomposition into well-formed user stories and tasks
• Ensure all work entering a sprint meets the definition of ready: clear acceptance criteria, identified dependencies, understood technical approach, and validated alignment with the Product Manager's intent
• Identify and surface scope, dependency, or feasibility issues at the epic level before they become delivery problems
• Elicit, analyze, and validate business and functional requirements in collaboration with the Product Manager, business stakeholders, and engineering teams
• Lead product discovery activities – including stakeholder engagement and solution validation – to ensure work is grounded in real business need before entering the pipeline
• Translate business needs into clear, delivery-ready functional requirements, user stories, process flows, and acceptance criteria
• Translate technical constraints and trade-offs back to the Product Manager and business stakeholders in accessible terms
• Serve as the primary product contact for engineering teams day to day – available to answer questions, clarify requirements, and make real-time scope decisions
• Partner with the Delivery Lead as a peer in the delivery pod. The Product Lead owns the what; the Delivery Lead owns the how and when. Neither role is subordinate to the other
• Attend and facilitate sprint reviews, translating technical progress into business value language for stakeholders and the Product Manager
• Track product performance against defined KPIs post-delivery, contributing data to value realization reviews

Minimum Education

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution or equivalent industry experience
• Professional certification in Agile methodology preferred

Minimum Experience

• 5+ years of progressive professional experience as an IT Business Analyst, Product Owner, or comparable role on medium to large-scale software delivery initiatives
• Demonstrated experience owning a product backlog or requirements pipeline in an agile delivery environment
• Experience working embedded within or alongside engineering delivery teams
• Experience with both waterfall and agile methodologies

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities

• Demonstrated ability to own and prioritize a product backlog, making sequencing and trade-off decisions that maximize value delivery
• Proficiency with epic-to-story decomposition and the discipline to enforce readiness standards without creating unnecessary overhead
• Familiarity with value-based prioritization frameworks and the ability to apply them in a transparent, defensible way
• Advanced expertise in requirements elicitation, analysis, and documentation from diverse stakeholder groups
• Strong user story writing, process mapping, and acceptance criteria development skills
• Ability to develop business cases including options analysis, benefits, risks, and cost/benefit assessment
• Ability to evaluate technology solutions against business requirements and communicate trade-offs to non-technical audiences
• Demonstrated ability to work as a peer partner to a Delivery Lead, owning the product lane without overstepping into delivery management
• Experience facilitating refinement sessions, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives in an agile environment
• Ability to make real-time product decisions during delivery without requiring constant escalation
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex requirements and technical trade-offs to both business and technical audiences
• Proven ability to build trusted relationships with business stakeholders, engineering teams, and product leadership
• Strong facilitation, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in ambiguous or fast-moving situations
• Sufficient technical fluency to engage meaningfully with engineering teams and evaluate trade-offs from a product perspective
• Proficiency with agile delivery tools (Azure DevOps / TFS preferred) and standard productivity applications