Senior Product Owner (Hybrid - Raleigh, Jersey City, New York City)

Job Summary

The Senior Product Owner is the 'voice of the customer' within the Agile development team and is responsible for supporting the optimization of business outcomes and product development process on our digital transformation efforts. This role will own multiple product/team delivery roadmaps, manage relationships and stakeholder communications, maintain product strategy and business alignment in delivery team backlog and work to deliver results quickly.

About the Role

This role functions within the Middle Market Commercial and Entertainment sector of Arch Insurance IT. It requires strong system-level fluency, must understand integrations, workflows, and IT concepts well enough to translate technical details into business outcomes while working closely with engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Create, maintain, and prioritize multiple product backlog, ensuring items align with product vision and strategy to meet business objectives, and reflect evolving business needs and priorities aligned to business outcomes.
• Responsible for ensuring the backlogs content includes user stories, enablers and defects with work ready for the team to execute.
• Responsible for accepting stories while confirming the story meets approved standards, acceptance test and compiles with definition of done to ensure quality.
• Ensure the backlog supports architectural runway.
• Coach other Product Owners on backlog management.
• Ensure user stories are clear, concise, and well-defined to accurately represent the business need and fit with the product strategy with the clear direction and ability to facilitate development.
• Responsible for breaking down stories into small parts, clarifies details and ensures usability.
• Collaborate with the product management team to ensure the team is focused on the highest value work based on business needs, product strategy and/or initiative delivery and user feedback.
• Ensure the backlog reflects the vision and delivery roadmap, addresses solutions and delivery expectations.
• Provides coaching to Product Owners and acts as a bridge between product management and delivery teams.
• Facilitate communication and collaboration between the development team, designers, and other stakeholders.
• Collaborate with the domain product managers and development team to define sprint goals, select user stories, and facilitate sprint planning aligned with team capacity each sprint in line with the domain’s priorities and strategy.
• Communicate with the agile delivery team on the vision during planning to prepare teams to execute and deliver solutions.
• Define clear acceptance criteria for each user story to ensure quality and delivery expectations are met.
• Collaborate with the team to plan and manage product releases in line with the domain’s product and/or initiative delivery strategy as defined by the product manager.
• Facilitate frequent team conversations to resolve questions, manage dependencies and communicate emerging priorities as stories are implemented.
• Collaborate with the product managers to ensure the team is focused on the highest value work based on business needs, product strategy and/or initiative delivery and user feedback.
• Ensure the backlog reflects the vision and delivery roadmap addresses solutions and delivery expectations. Responsible for ranking backlog items and ensuring proper sequence based on high value aligned with the product strategy.
• Track and analyze key product metrics to measure success and identify areas for improvement.
• Regularly check progress toward meeting story acceptance criteria and ensure quality standards are met, like Definition of Done and nonfunctional requirements.
• Collaborates closely with the team to identify and fix quality issues.

Experience/Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in related field
• 8-10 years’ prior experience in Insurance, Product Owner with IT development teams in Agile delivery & execution through software development lifecycle using Agile/Scrum/SAFe frameworks or related / relevant role(s)
• Experienced in playing a product owner role managing multiple products in the development of large scale commercial and specialty systems (DuckCreek, Guidewire, Unqork, UW Platforms, Submission & Clearance Systems, Extraction or AI-driven platforms etc.) and demonstrated value creation and business outcomes
• Proven experience in Agile frameworks like Scrum and SAFe and tool such as JIRA, Confluence, MIRO and other product management and roadmap tools
• Deep understanding of commercial and specialty insurance product lifecycle