SAFe Product Owner
Our Senior Product Owners are crucial members of the extended Agile Product Management team. We look for our Product Owners to lead the Sprint Team backlog representing the source of truth and relying heavily on you as the single point of contact for the Development and Customer teams for user story details. The majority of applications you will be working with will relate to the financial sector.
As a Senior PO you will define and refine our user stories ; prioritizing the Agile Team backlog to streamline execution of product (program) priorities while maintaining conceptual and technical integrity of features for the team. In this capacity the PO remains highly available to the Dev teams during each iteration (sprint) in order to answer real time questions and provide clarity to user stories. PO also drives refinement activities ensuring Team backlog contains 2 iterations worth of ‘ready’ work for Dev team. These two functions are essential to enabling Dev teams to improve and maintain high velocity / efficiency in iteration (sprint) execution. For this reason, a PO supports a single Agile (Scrum) Team up to a maximum of 2 teams.
The Senior PO also play a key part in our quality control; we empower our PO team to accept stories as done, ensuring the acceptance criteria has been met. You will develop significant relationships and responsibilities outside of the specific Agile team, including working with Product Management, who manages the Product (Program) Backlog, to prepare for the Program Increment (PI) Planning meeting (Big Room Planning).
What you’ll do in your role.
Business and Technical Execution
- Develop a deep understanding of customer experience at a tactical and transaction level.
- Builds and maintains Agile (Scrum / Sprint) team backlog with input from various team members
- Collaborate with Agile teams and business owners to write user stories and requirements that include acceptance criteria and acceptance tests.
- Reviews and prioritizes the backlog for Iteration (Sprint) Planning, including coordination of dependencies with other PO’s.
- Reviews and assesses enabler work, understands scope of the upcoming enabler work and collaborates with System and Solution Architect/Engineering to assist with decision-making and sequencing of the technical infrastructures.
- Be the primary resource to Technical (Dev) team and Customer team for user story details.
- Leads and maintains efficient flow of user story refinement activities throughout team execution.
- Participates in team demo with primary responsibility of reviewing and accepting completed user stories. The PO is the only team member who can accept as done! This includes validation that stories meet the acceptance criteria and team’s Definition of Done (DoD).
- Participates in Iteration Retrospective, where teams gather to improve their processes. Also actively supports the Agile Release Train’s (ART’s) Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop.
- The PI system demo is part of the I&A workshop. The PO has an instrumental role in producing the demo for program partners.
- Coordinates user story, functional, and technical details with other Product Owners throughout each iteration and Program Increment. This is often done in weekly PO/ART sync meetings.
Relationship & People, Professional Development
You will develop positive relationships with Customer groups or Customer Representatives, technical and non-technical teams, including sales, commercial accounting, marketing, legal, go-to-market and finance!
- Develops professional and technical knowledge by attending educational workshops; reviews professional publications; establishes personal networks; participates in professional societies.
- Actively participates in Product Owner/Manager Community of Practice (COP)
Required Experience
- 7+ years of relevant Product Management, Product Owner, Business Analyst, and System Analyst or Architecture/Software Engineer experience in an agile software product development environment. Advanced level understanding of customer experience.
- SAFe Product Owner, CSPO, or SAFe Program Consultant Certification required.
- Service Cloud and Community Cloud Experience required.
- Project Management Experience and PMP Certification is a plus.
- Technical Writing: Strong requirements elicitation, and proven writing skills including the ability to write concisely and clearly for different audiences.
- Agile Project Management: Experience with Agile backlog/project management tools.
- User Experience: Experience with successive elaboration and ability to develop Initiatives, Features and User Stories that the DevOps teams can ingest
- Proven track record to effectively and efficiently connect with Leadership, technical and non-technical audiences while employing a high degree of collaboration and influence.
- Strong business analytical skills with the capability of identifying, analyzing, synthesizing product use data.
- Scrum Product Owner certification (CSPO) preferred.
