Product Owner

The primary goal of the Product Owner role is to lead the development of the product. Your role has a greater understanding of the products’ technical components and inner workings. You will enable new capabilities that build upon the most innovative and intuitive platform in the industry. You will own the more technical parts of the product strategy and form close working relationships with development, engineering and infrastructure teams. It will require the ability to work among a wide array of stakeholders including sales engineering, delivery, partners, clients and users.

A key activity is to manage and make visible the product backlog by working from the prioritized list of requirements, which you share in ownership with the Director of Product. You will be responsible for leading the development efforts for your product. You should be the voice of the technical teams while also representing the customer in these efforts.

**Product Owner Key Responsibilities**
- Translate and align business objectives, strategic priorities and customer needs into a prioritized backlog of epics, features and user stories
- Collaborates with engineering and quality assurance to ensure the right customer problem is solved through review and reinforcement of the vision and direction
- Define success criteria for testing and product acceptance.
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Manage backlog*
- Develops t-shirt sizing of product backlog in collaboration with team Technical Leads
- Ensures user stories meet the Definition of Ready for development to start work
- Gathers, manages, and prioritizes the product backlog.
- Ensure that the team always has an adequate number of ‘ready’ tasks to work on
- **Iteration Planning**:

- Ensures close collaboration with the development team.
- Provide an active role in mitigating impediments impacting successful team completion of Release/Sprint development, including progress reviews during the sprint to assure that development is in line with expected outcomes and to reduce the risk of late found defects

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Demonstrates technical knowledge or specific domain expertise and the workings of their product
- Lead the product release plans and sets the expectation for delivery of new functionalities in collaboration with the technical leads before during and after sprint cycles
- Tracks progress towards the release of a product by creating and communicating release metric reports as part of each sprint cycle
- Define customer needs and the associated features to meet those needs. Take a “What problem are we trying to solve?” philosophy/approach to product development
- Prioritize delivery of highest value features while minimizing development effort
- Advocates on behalf of the customer for the development team
- Prioritizes defect or bug resolution based on organizational objectives
- Update product development tracking tools
- Collaborate with cross functional teams during design, build, test and launch of new features
- Clearly and confidently communicate via product deep dives
- Answer incoming questions about the product and its capabilities.
- Facilitate the creation and maintenance of proper product documentation.

**Skills/ Experience**
- 5+ years of hands-on experience managing software product backlog of defects, technical debt and new features
- Demonstrated track record of collaborating with development, product management and customers
- 3+ years delivering outcomes across all relevant domains using Infrastructure as Code.
- 3+ years of experience in mission critical or cloud software management and optimization.
- Knowledge of agile software development practices
- Ability to manage resources across distinct locations and time zones.
- Translate customer needs into detailed requirements and user stories
- Strong management and project management skills for planning and executing complex projects.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills across multiple audience types
- Experience working in a fast-paced and goal-driven environment
- **GIS / ESRI knowledge and experience a plus**

**Required Behavioral Competencies**
- A passion for delivering outcomes, extreme ownership, and leading teams to success.
- A proactive and data-driven mindset to identify and address problems early.