Technical Product Manager
1 year contract
3 days onsite in Bellevue, WA
Our client is seeking a Principal Technical Product Owner with a background in website technology platforms that enable amazing customer experiences. Technical Product Owners partner with technology teams to understand the requirements for maintaining and enabling our technology stack, keeping it secure, reducing technical debt, and enabling developer flow. Their primary tools for supporting the organization are robust technology roadmaps built in collaboration with IT Architecture and their technology product backlogs comprised of the technology organization needs for their aligned Scrum team to execute on.
This opportunity directly supports our technology teams responsible for our website built on Sitecore as our content management, Xamarin for our Mobile app, our internal employee website built on MS Sharepoint, and several integrated solutions for customer notification and energy management.
Day to day our Product Owners work as part of a Scrum team building and maintaining our product backlog, prioritizing stories, and providing real time feedback on our development activities in partnership with aligned Agile Delivery Lead (Scrum Master). Our TPO also supports IT leadership in sizing, estimating, and planning IT Operational Projects as part of routine portfolio management throughout the year in addition to supporting technology enablement initiatives for other technology teams throughout the company. Simply put, our TPO’s are deeply embedded in our technology implementations focused on system integration and maintenance and less on the business product enablement aspects of these technologies.
Job Responsibilities
- Applies advanced knowledge of web technology services to proactively identify opportunities and develop innovative solutions for processes in the most demanding business/technology situations.
- Advocates for Agile principles with a strong focus on customer outcomes, team health and accountability.
- Participates in portfolio planning activities to clarify project or technology enablement work to support teams breaking down work into story maps.
- Develops or contributes to the definition of team/department level technology roadmaps to create alignment within teams.
- Develop epics, features and user stories and acceptance criteria in partnership with the Tech Lead, Development team, and key stakeholders.
- Regularly refines the technology or product backlog by clarifying acceptance criteria, sizing the story, associating and creating appropriate feature or epic level stories, updating the work priority, and removing old stories in collaboration with development team members in aligned work management tool (Azure Dev Ops or ServiceNow).
- Prioritizes the time required to support the development team by clarifying story acceptance criteria, intent, and providing feedback to technology recommendations and solutions
- Reviews work delivered by the team and validated that it meets the acceptance criteria of the feature or story; and either accepts or rejects the work
- Maintains strong working relationships with Scrum Master (Agile Delivery Lead), Technical Lead, and aligned IT Architects for assigned technology efforts regularly collaborating on roadmap vision, technology product management, and synchronizing future technology investments to evolving technology team needs.
- Advocates for the team during Scrum of Scrum sessions or portfolio overviews; depicting the value of the teams' activities to business initiatives and reviewing past and current challenges faced with plans to resolve these issues in partnership with aligned Scrum Master.
- Demonstrates success leading teams or collaborating with business partners and peer-level professionals from other IT teams or other PSE departments, vendor, or consulting organizations.
- Identifies key metrics and KPIs, and associated reporting methods to ensure ongoing IT technology operations excellence. Mentors' peers to acquire fine points of professional practice.
- In hybrid or waterfall project aligned team, support directly or creates non-functional requirements. Regularly translates requirements to user stories on project team behalf. Does upfront work before alignment to Scrum team to perform systems analysis/design across multiple technology platforms. Participate in project ceremonies such as steering committee meetings or project go-live orchestration. .
- Estimates technology services required for large projects involving multiple departments, platforms, technologies, executive sponsors, or particularly high-risk business problems.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree and 8 years of experience in a related field; or combination of specialized training or experience and eight years of directly relevant experience.
- Experience in business case development, requirements management, software product backlog management, story mapping and use case development.
- Understanding of IT Technology services and software development lifecycles.
- Demonstrated team leadership and facilitation techniques for software product management, business processes and key drivers and measures for success for represented business units.
- Must be a self-starter. Ability to work independently and in a team environment.
- Demonstrated creative thinking and analytical skills, with strong attention to detail and excellent written and oral communication skills.
- Proficiency in Microsoft applications, including Teams, Word, Excel, Outlook, Azure Dev Ops and Visio.
- Prior experience managing small to mid-sized projects/teams.
Desired Qualifications
- Web Development or proven related experience working with or managing technology portfolios for customer facing web platforms: Opensource Java Frameworks for front end development, Sitecore, Cassandra, customer notification platforms (sendgrid/twilio).
- Certified Product Owner or related Software Product Management Certifications.
- Utility experience in a business or technology role supporting customers/customer systems especially for dual provider utilities (gas and electricity)
- 8+ years in a Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, Principal IT Business or Systems Analyst like roles.
- Experience in business case development for technology operational maintenance and upgrade projects.
