Staff Product Owner

Summary

Responsible for operating in lockstep with product management to create a clear strategic direction for build needs for a product in your team's portfolio. You will work with the team and deliver a clear and descriptive set of requirements to enable the delivery of a products features and functionality. Your priority is seamless integration and alignment of perspectives from a broad set of stakeholders: Product Managers, Technical Anchors, Service Owners and Developers.

Job Description

Roles and Responsibilities

In this role, you will:

• Build relationships with your internal customers across Grid's engineering & services teams, in order to understand their biggest needs and pain points related in Developer Experience, CICD and DevOps.
• Demonstrates excelling business acumen, knows latest industry trends and is looked at as an internal expert on the product as well as the associated competitive landscape.
• Interacts with customers/stakeholders in VOC requirements-gathering, fine tuning, and obtaining product feedback.
• Works with cross-functional teams to deliver features and significant products.
• Possesses a deep understanding of the technology stack and impact on final product.
• Routinely collaborates with UX in design decisions. Conducts customer and stakeholder interviews and elaborates on personas.
• Demonstrate superior persuasion and influencing skills that ensure alignment between customer, product manager and engineering teams.
• Owns the releases and sprint backlogs short-term roadmap for MVPs and quarterly releases.
• Owns and manages the backlog; continuously orders and prioritizes to ensure that 1-2 sprints/iterations of backlog are always ready.
• Prioritizes continuously in accordance with the understanding and validation of customer problems and needs.
• Demonstrates strategic level skills in problem decomposition and ability to navigate through ambiguity.
• Engages frequently (50% of the time) with the development team; facilitates discussions, provides clarification, story acceptance and refinement, testing and validation; contributes to design activities and decisions.
• Translates unstructured or ambiguous work requests into actionable user stories and work unit.
• Partners with Development Leadership/Service Owners to ensure healthy development process.
• Mentors junior team members.
• Expert in Agile Methodology.

Education Qualification

For roles outside USA:

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or STEM Majors (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) with minimum 8+ years of experience.

Desired Characteristics

• Experience on software projects in the Energy domain (Energy Management, Oil & Gas, Power & Water).
• An understanding of best practice business analysis methods and tools
• Experience with Agile software development methodologies (Scrum)
• Results driven person with strong interpersonal skills
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to interface with senior leadership with confidence and clarity
• Able to energize teams through inclusiveness and connection with people, encouraging input from all members of the team.
• Able to work well with global teams, including time-zone flexibility
• Willingness to travel both regionally and internationally.

Business Acumen:

• Demonstrates the initiative to explore alternate approaches to solving problems
• Skilled in breaking down problems, documenting problem statements and estimating efforts
• Has the ability to analyze impact of technology choices
• Demonstrates knowledge of the competitive environment

Leadership:

• Pre-emptively sees downstream consequences and effectively tailors influencing strategy to support a positive outcome.
• Able to verbalize what is behind decisions and downstream implications. Continuously reflecting on success and failures to improve performance and decision-making.
• Understands when change is needed. Participates in technical strategy planning.

Personal Attributes:

• Able to effectively direct and mentor others in critical thinking skills. Proactively engages with cross-functional teams to resolve issues and design solutions using critical thinking and analysis skills and best practices. Finds important patterns in seemingly unrelated information.
• Influences and energizes other toward the common vision and goal. Maintains excitement for a process and drives to new directions of meeting the goal even when odds and setbacks render one path impassable.
• Innovates and integrates new processes and/or technology to significantly add value to GE. Identifies how the cost of change weighs against the benefits and advises accordingly. Proactively learns new solutions and processes to address seemingly unanswerable problems.