Proxy Product Owner Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Job Overview

The Product Owner serves as the customer proxy to the Agile team. Working as part of the Product Management team, they will own, define, and prioritize the team backlog, establish story acceptance criteria, drive content via prioritized user stories, obtain customer validation and accept stories, ensuring that the solution effectively addresses overall program priorities while maintaining technical integrity.

This position will typically be supported by more senior Product Owners in fulfilling their responsibilities, and will increasingly work independently as they gain competence, guiding an Agile Team to deliver value.

While this position will be attentive to the needs of the Agile team, we are looking for a Product Owner who wants some customer face time and regular interaction with Services and Sales Engineering. This individual should also be familiar with building feedback loops between the Agile team, Customer Support, SaaS Ops, and Services.

Key Responsibilities

Product Ownership

• Assist in continuous market research and assessment activities to ensure the team is aligned to the market opportunities, and able to react quickly to changing market dynamics.
• Assist in building customer and user insights into all stages of the planning and execution process, ensuring the continuous validation of features and stories with Customers and users.
• Build feedback loops between the Agile team, Customer Support, SaaS Ops, and Services
• Proactively analyze, report, and recommend changes to the product based on data from feedback loops
• Participate in Services and Sales Engineering technical enablement sessions
• Participate in Voice of the Customer sessions
• Advocate for the customer when making trade-offs or prioritization decisions

Program Increment (PI) Planning

• Assist in Program Increment (PI) Planning, including:
  • Support preparation of presentation materials critical to the PI planning process.
• Actively participate in the PI Planning process, including:
• Work in close partnership with assigned Agile Team, providing business and customer context to the planning activities.
• Lead the definition of User Stories and Story Acceptance Criteria in partnership with the Agile Team.
• Work with the team to define the definition of ready/done.
• Lead User Story prioritization.
• Draft the Agile Team Program Increment objectives/project charter.
• Able to facilitate and gather high level ‘t-shirt size’ estimates from engineering to support long term planning and decision support

Iteration Planning

• Lead the on-going refinement of the Team Backlog, including:
  • Story Prioritization
  • Sizing of stories
• Actively support the Agile Team during iteration planning, including:
• Lead story refinement and elaboration, ensuring stories are clear, unambiguous, and ready for the team to work on.
• Own definition of story acceptance criteria.
• Accept the final iteration plan during the iteration planning meeting.
• Own and communicate the definition of the Sprint Goals on behalf of the Agile Team.

Program Increment Execution

• Attend Agile Team ceremonies including Daily Stand-ups or Retrospectives as needed.
• Support the Team Demo, including:
  • Facilitating a part of the system demo.
  • Accept stories into the backlog, including validation that the story meets its acceptance criteria and definition of done.
• Participate in and contribute to the Retrospectives/Inspect and Adapt sessions.

Typical Role Definition

Professional Staff. An intermediate level professional role. Some evaluation, originality or ingenuity required to perform tasks. Knows and applies the fundamental concepts, practices, and procedures of a particular field.

Job-Specific Authority and Scope

• Generally works without consulting their manager.
• Independent decisions are made daily.
• Examples of typical decisions without manager consultation:
  • Builds, prunes, prioritizes, and maintains the team backlog.
  • Accepts the final iteration plan during the iteration planning meeting.
  • Accepts stories into the baseline.
• Typically has no direct reports.
• Typically has no total staff.
• Typically has a global geographic focus.
• Typically does not manage a budget.

Business Travel and Physical Demands

Business travel of approximately 10 or less percent yearly is expected for this position.

Physical demands:

• Office environment. No special physical demands required.