Product Owner

As the Product Owner, you will be responsible for prioritizing and managing product backlogs for multiple teams that provide different product offerings. As part of the Product Management organization, you will have an opportunity to lead transformational efforts in standardizing requirements gathering, and release planning to align with the organization's strategic vision and roadmap. You will partner with critical Product Managers and Engineering Leaders to define well-written requirements that meet the definition-of-ready to ensure its successful execution.

This role is an intermediary on requirements between Product Management, Engineering, and QA teams. You will have the opportunity to be put in a highly visible role as you are the primary liaison for ensuring Engineering teams are delivering the right products and features that meet customers' demands and expectations.

You will be expected to take on shared responsibilities with program-level planning along with other Product Owner(s).

**Job Duties and Responsibilities**:

- Define and groom requirements at both the Epic and Story level, so that requirements are concise, well-formatted, and can be easily understood with no ambiguity.
- Writes requirements with a heavy emphasis on defining the customer journey workflows at a granular level.
- Manage product backlogs to ensure all Epics and Stories are prioritized and regularly maintained.
- Perform Release Planning based on the prioritized backlog to ensure Engineering Teams can scope for multiple sprints in advance.
- Perform tactical responsibilities of decomposing Epics and Stories into additional smaller/split Stories as needed based on the Engineering teams' feedback and capacities.
- Manages, prioritizes, and assesses the impact of all work items (e.g., new features, defects, enhancements, etc.) to provide recommendations on whether the work should be accepted, or re-prioritized based on the value it brings to end-users.
- Weighs business risks, issues, and impediments being experienced by the product team and actively assists with issue resolution.
- Leverages data-driven metrics (e.g., sizing, budget, revenue-generation) and/or research conducted to justify reasoning for why items in product backlogs should be reprioritized.
- Works with multiple teams within programs to identify cross-team dependencies that are blocking a release, feature, or functionality from being implemented.
- Ability to hold Product Managers accountable for ensuring the product vision and roadmaps are clearly defined and communicated so that Product Owners can effectively prioritize product backlogs.
- Validates product direction by interacting with Product Managers to overcome ambiguity and uncertainty during product development and communicate well to internal stakeholders.
- Participate in Sprint Planning and Standups to provide guidance and ensure Engineering Teams are planning their work to align with the prioritized product backlogs.
- Assist with standardizing User Story writing best practices and estimation (story-pointing).
- Assist with standardizing release trains and sprint cadences across multiple teams.
- Assist with introducing and standardizing Scrum ceremonies (e.g., standups, retros, demos)
- Assists with program and project-level plans related to schedule, scope and resources.
- Assist with PI (program increment) planning and maintaining a PI board.
- Review and accept or decline the output of development to ensure specified acceptance criteria have been completed.
- Coach Product Managers to ensure initial requirements are well-written so that Product Owner(s) have the information needed to begin grooming.
- Serves as an expert in Agile development and execution, regularly seeking out opportunities to enhance and improve operational processes.

**Required Skillsets**
- 5+ years of experience as a product owner OR business analyst.
- Must have a strong desire to take ownership in defining and grooming requirements.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills in American English.
- Fosters an inclusive workplace where diversity and individual differences are valued.
- Experience with using Atlassian Jira and Confluence (cloud instances).
- Experience with Agile and SAFe Agile practices; including Scrum, Lean, and Kanban frameworks.
- Basic knowledge and/or familiarity with Aha Roadmaps.
- Self-starter with ability to effectively communicate the problem statement and recommended solutions.
- Ability to develop rapport with the relevant internal teams and ensure use-case clarity to engineering teams.
- Demonstrated ability to drive requirement definition sessions, working closely with stakeholders across the entire organization and with developers.
- Relevant experience or knowledge of public cloud infrastructure and cloud-native technologies is required.
- Proven ability to recognize value and identify gaps that negatively impact end-users' experience.
- Experience in UI/UX projects is highly de