BI Product Owner

The Product Owner (PO) is a member of the Agile Team responsible for defining stories and prioritizing the team backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the features or components for the team. The PO has a significant role in maximizing the value produced by the team and ensuring stories meet the user’s needs and comply with the definition of done. This role has significant relationships and responsibilities outside the local team, including working with Product Management, Customers, Business Owners, and other stakeholders.

Principal Duties:

• Serve as the customer proxy responsible for working with Product Management and other stakeholders including other POs to define and prioritize stories in grooming the team backlog.
• Ensure work done by the team aligns to the wider business strategy.
• Assist Product and Solution Management with developing the vision and roadmap.
• Responsible for the team’s overall direction and clarity on the product delivery.
• Demonstrate commitment by doing whatever is necessary to build the best product possible and actively engage with the team.
• Provide availability and participation to the team and attend all Agile team ceremonies including supporting PI Planning initiative.
• Prioritize and plan iteration goals for the team that have been agreed upon and that align to the Program Increment Objectives and articulate other development priorities (i.e. Refactoring, Tech Debt, Outside Needs), while ensuring the team alignment of the iteration goals.
• Lead the team through iterations and help the team maintain focus on the goal of that iteration.
• Manage and prioritize the team backlog including breaking down features to be included in the iterations.
• Manage the scope and ensure that once an iteration starts that “no” new requirements are added to the iteration without clear economic trade-offs being understood.
• Participate in team retrospective and accountable to create team demo.
• Work with the Product Manager to ensure the value of the solution with solid understanding of users, the marketplace, the competition and of future trends for the domain or type of system being developed.
• Work across teams to define and implement improvement stories that will increase the velocity and quality of the program.

Essential Functions:

• Ability to communicate and negotiate at both team and leadership levels.
• Facilitate high-performance collaborative teams to rapidly develop and implement innovative, sustainable solutions.
• Understand the agile ways of working and influence behavioral change as it relates to SAFe framework.
• Remove barriers and make decisions quickly while gaining alignment.
• “Fail fast” and move quickly approach.
• Articulate strategy and initiatives into action plans.
• Excellent coach with a solid understanding of what it takes to drive agile transformations.
• Responsible for stakeholder communication and expectation management skills.
• Be a proactive problem solver.
• Proven ability to act with tenacity and think differently.
• Self-direct and independently organize work with little supervision.
• Ability to resolve conflict through negotiation reasoned discussion or escalation and drive resolution.
• Effectively engage and manage multiple projects at once.
• Demonstrated understanding of systems
• Outstanding communication, presentation and leadership skills

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field is preferred; a Master’s degree a plus.
• Minimum of 5+ years of experience managing medium to large projects.
• 3+ years working with Agile development teams. Certification as Scrum Master (CSM), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) or other Agile relevant certifications are preferred.
• Demonstrated in-depth knowledge of Agile process, principles and product development process.
• Previous working experience as an Agile Product Owner preferred.
• Knowledge of various well-documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach.
• Project management certification preferred (PMP, Prince 2, Agile (Scrum).