Product Owner

Purpose

Do you enjoy working with others to solve problems and bring ideas to life? Are you someone who likes to stay organized, ask questions, and help move work forward?

ARAG is hiring a Product Owner! In this role you’ll work closely with stakeholders, UX and the scrum development team to deliver solutions that support our business and customers.

The Product Owner serves as a bridge between business stakeholders and the Technology Innovation Group (TIG). This role will take ownership for project outcomes by translating business goals into iterative deliverables, prioritizing the product roadmap and backlog for optimal delivery and communicating targets and status to the organization. The Product Owner will maintain strong stakeholder relationships and lead cross-functional teams in efficiently delivering creative solutions to ensure ARAG’s competitive edge. Unique to ARAG, the Product Owner will support several different systems, assisted by technical and business subject matter experts to drive project momentum and decision making.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Create and maintain strategic project roadmaps that reflect ARAG’s vision.
• Collaborate with stakeholders, users and scrum team to understand and accurately represent their needs.
• Manage the product backlog, prioritizing features and stories that drive the greatest business value, keeping scope, quality and cost-benefit top of mind.
• Lead scrum team members through the creation of innovative and impactful solutions, offering daily input including answering questions, clarifying stories, reviewing demos, etc.
• Regularly update the organization on project development progress and ongoing project metrics.
• Advocate for Product Owner best practices and standards to heighten ARAG’s Product Owner maturity.
• Maintain a deep understanding of ARAG’s audiences, processes, systems and tools to identify gaps and recommend future state capabilities.
• Participate in department leadership, assisting with department goals and team structures.
• Provide thought leadership, keeping pulse on trends and proactively bring opportunties to the organization for consideration.
• Conduct product demos with internal and external stakeholders.
• Serve as a cultural steward and positive role model by representing ARAG at Its Best and Leadership at Its Best.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

Knowledge

• Experience leading project teams to successfully deploy solutions through software development lifecycle.
• Knowledge of agile development methodology and roles (scrum preferred).
• Experience effectively managing a product backlog inclusive of new features, defects, technical debt, automation, spikes and innovation.
• Experience executing a minimum viable product (MVP) approach.

Skills

• Ability to deliver a short-term and long-term product vision/roadmap
• Highly organized with ability to effectively self-manage workload across multiple projects and teams, prioritizing based on highest impact work
• Ability to delegate work and hold accountable dynamic team members with varying disciplines and skill levels
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with ability to clearly articulate and present complex concepts to varying audiences
• Interpersonal skills to collaborate, educate and gain buy-in across internal and external stakeholders
• Ability to take initiative and advocate for purposeful change and constant improvement that sets ARAG apart from the rest
• Problem-solving and analytical skills to gather and analyze data, identify, and interpret trends, create solutions to solve complex challenges and make data driven decisions
• Ability to effectively operate and remain positive in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment while maintaining a fail fast, move forward mindset

Education

• Four-year college degree in business, computer science, marketing or related field from an accredited college or university or equivalent experience.

Experience

• 2 to 4 years of related experience.

Certifications

• None required.  

Physical

• Some travel required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.