Manager, Agile Product Owner

As a key leader in the Agile Delivery process, the Manger, Agile Product Owner is the final authority for decisions regarding priority, business value, and functionality for all work completed by the Agile development team. This role will work closely with Product Management to understand and execute the long-term vision for their responsible domain(s).  The Manager, Agile Product Owner represents the “voice of the customer” at the Agile team level, maintaining and prioritizing the product backlog to ensure that the team is working on stories that maximize business value and deliver necessary fixes and functionality to all customers.  The Manager, Agile Product Owner applies specialized product knowledge and expertise to understand business and technology objectives, communicates the product vision and roadmap from the Product Manager to the Agile team, prioritizes and translates needs into user stories and acceptance criteria to ensure that expected outcomes are achieved. This is a remote position.

Primary Job Responsibilities Will Focus on the Following:

Execution

• Own, prioritize, and maintain the product backlog, including the definition of epics, user stories, acceptance criteria to achieve the product vision

• Collaborates with a cross-functional team of designers, business analysts, developers, testers, and others to develop and execute against product roadmaps and release plans

• Works with stakeholders and development teams to break down epic-level user stories into detail-level stories consumable and testable by a scrum team

• Collaborate with User Experience partners in usability testing and the development of the user design

• Manage, prioritize, and assess the impact of defects, including providing key input on the decisions to fix or defer

• Reviews, accepts, and prioritizes feedback and new requirements from project stakeholders

• Ensure that the products meet the stated business need

• Accepts completed scrum teamwork, and evaluates delivered work against functional and non-functional requirements

• Work with team members to ensure the product functionality is appropriately documented

• Assist customer support teams and develop and implement training and communications that allow partners and internal clients to better understand the products and changes that were made

• Advise operations and product management teams on the technical and process implications of design solutions

• Participate in planning activities and proactively partner with other Product Owners to ensure alignment on dependent platforms

• Obtaining full alignment with Product Manager on functionality and scope for execution

Leadership

• Owns aligning product backlog to strategic roadmaps and demonstrating the value of planned and delivered work to strategic roadmaps.

• Promote and drive Agile development methodology throughout the work and teams

• Takes a lead role in engaging business partners and various stakeholders to understand requirements, pain points, hidden needs, and expected outcomes.

• Serve as the voice of the customer with delivery teams, representing/reinforcing the customer perspective throughout the product realization cycle

• Continuously and transparently communicate with internal stakeholders the prioritization of the product backlog and the status of development efforts via product demos, release plans, and other means

• In partnership with IT Delivery Management, balance business solution requirements with technical feasibility and balance feature development with technical debt reduction.

Subject Matter Expertise

• Act as the subject-matter expert

• Demonstrate expertise in one’s respective domain; stay abreast on trends in customer needs and expectations

• Provides input into the strategic product roadmap owned by product management by leveraging the knowledge of the products value stream and system interactions to identify when new features or product changes are needed to achieve business value

• Provide input to Product Managers for necessary changes or product backlog items coming out of scrum development that need to be considered on a future roadmap

• Business acumen to be able to translate business value from a roadmap/vision to tactical execution

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or 4 years equivalent large-scale program development work experience

• 5 years of experience in leading teams or process improvement initiates

• Strong leadership and teaming skills

• Demonstrated ability to manage and prioritize diverse elements of complex projects for people, tasks, communication, change, etc. to drive optimal outcomes and results- strong project management and multi-tasking skills

• Ability to excel in a large, matrix environment

• Strong attention to detail and focus on root-cause analysis

• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and conflict resolution skills

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills demonstrated through past experience and results

• Ability to communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing

• Skilled at leading meetings and making presentations

• Demonstrated ability to act as a servant leader to ensure the success of the product implementation and team effectiveness

Preferred Experience, Skills, and Knowledge:

• An advanced degree

• Agile certifications such as Product Manager or Product Owner

• Experience collaborating with teams comprised of both on-shore and off-shore models is recommended.

• 3 years of experience successfully delivering products utilizing an Agile Delivery methodology

• 5 years’ Assurant systems and process experience (or similar external applications)

• Business acumen to be able to translate business value from a roadmap/vision to tactical execution

• Experience with backlog creation and management in common tools (AzureDevOps, VSTS, Jira, etc.)

• Prior experience working as a Product Owner in an Agile Transformation environment

• Experience with various Agile frameworks (Scrum, SAFe, etc.)

• Hands-on experience with process improvement methodologies (Lean, 6Sigma, etc.)

#AssurantProudSD