Staff Technical Product Owner

Job Description Summary

The Staff Technical Product Owner is an integral member of the product engineering team. This role uses domain and business process expertise to elaborate and convey detailed product requirements in the form of epics and user stories, together with supporting artifacts (such as business process maps and use cases) to the software development teams.

Job Description

Roles and Responsibilities

In this role, the Staff Technical Product Owner will ensure that requirements for the near-term upcoming development are sufficiently elaborated, such that the delivery team is enabled to estimate, plan and commit to delivery with high confidence. In addition, the role requires leadership, coaching, mentoring and working in direct collaboration with other global BA teams for an efficient and consistent process resulting in quality deliverables from the engineering team.

• Drives process definitions and improvements for agile development.
• Captures the voice of the customer to drive business process definitions and product needs.
• Work directly with engineering lead to manage the business analysis activities to meet engineering and product goals.
• Develop positive working relationships with external customers and users.
• Work directly with Product Managers and / or customers to define scope and value for new developments.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Product Management to prioritize scope for releases and groom the Product backlog.
• Responsible for ensuring that non-functional requirements exist and are prioritized alongside the functions in the Product and Release Backlogs.
• Facilitate the breakdown of the Epic User Stories into “Sprint Sized” User Stories and participate in backlog reviews with the development team.
• Ensure that the features in the User Stories / requirements are expressed in a way that all members of the team, and stakeholders, clearly understand the requirements and how they fit into the product backlog.
• Collaborate closely with UX to ensure requirements, scenarios, business process maps and other artifacts align with User Experience designs.
• Define requirement acceptance criteria with input from customers, product managers, and the engineering team. Generate and execute the required functional test cases.
• Validates that test scenarios meet the feature acceptance criteria and customer expectations.
• Responsible for the maintenance and quality of the documented user stories/requirements in the defined requirements management tool.
• Throughout the development cycle, remain focused on the software being produced and whether it meets the requirements. Proactively provide relevant feedback to internal and external stakeholders.
• Develop and be prepared to execute effective demonstrations of the product, to internal and external stakeholders.
• Maintain leading edge understanding of technologies and industry trends relevant to the application via training, webinars, on-line journals, Trade Shows and User Groups.
• Lead other business analysts, agree, and monitor objectives and undertake regular feedback.
  
  

Education Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related major, and a minimum of 5 years of experience.
  
  

Desired Characteristics

• Relevant electrical utility industry knowledge or expertise
• 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 technology and 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.
  
  

Additional Information

Relocation Assistance Provided: No