Job Title: Product Owner
Location: Chicago, IL
Job Type: Contract
Expected hours per week: 40 hours per week
Schedule: Monday-Friday, Hybrid (2 days onsite)
Pay Range: $95.00-$105.00 per hour
Position’s Contributions to Work Group:
- This position should be familiar with project management methodologies as they will participate in multiple projects representing expertise for the application or process.
- Strong ability to communicate across various groups and at all levels of the business that include stakeholders, business partners, customers and vendors.
- Manages software product change requests from customers, vendors, and internal staff.
- Knowledge of software engineering concepts that include development, testing, integrations and deployment of software or applications.
- Experience with managing products using Cloud technologies.
- Experienced with the business aspects and operation of digital products that include developing system software and integration platforms.
- Thorough understanding of UAT activities, tasks, tools and techniques; ability to design, implement and evaluate acceptance tests for end-users
Typical task breakdown:
- Responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team.
- Responsible for acting as Product Owner for larger, more complex projects with high value to the organization.
- Responsible for creating, maintaining and prioritizing the Product Backlog according to business value for the life of the project.
- Communicate Product Backlog priorities to the team.
- Act as the key decision-maker regarding what features the product will have.
- Responsible for the vision of what is to be built, and conveying that vision to the team.
- Collaborate with Lead Engineers on decomposition of epics and features into user stories that are small enough, or granular enough, to be achieved in a single sprint.
- Negotiate business requirements and their release dates with Product and development teams.
- Responsible for conveying the vision and goals at the beginning of every sprint.
- Responsible for defect management and prioritization.
- Work closely with key stakeholders throughout the organization.
- Responsible for making decisions on release dates and content.
- Represent the customer, interfacing and engaging with the customer.
- Leading the Daily Scrum.
- Lead the sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives and sprint demos.
- Inspect the product progress at the end of every Sprint and accept or reject the work that has been done by the Development Team.
- Act as the voice of the team, communicating status externally.
- Be a good role model of Scrum values; understand the framework and the roles of each team member.
- Be a champion for the agile community and help to further the community within the organization
Interaction with team:
- 13 folks in addition to the new roles coming out.
Work environment:
- In office 2days a week however a full return to office could happen, so candidates need to be okay with going in office 5 days a week
Education & Experience Required:
- Bachelor’s Degree is required with 10+ years’ experience / Master’s degree is required to have 8+ years exp
Required Technical Skills
(Required)
- 3+ years of experience as a technical product owner.
- Previous experience in leading a technical team while simultaneously managing multiple projects.
- Must have a strong understanding and proven experience in software development, including Java 17 or newer, RESTful APIs, databases, and AWS cloud development, with a focus on designing and developing cloud-native software solutions at scale.
- Experience managing product backlogs using Agile software tools such as Azure DevOps, JIRA, Mingle, VSTS, Team Services, Rally.
- Experience working with onshore/offshore team model.
- Experience using GenAI tools like GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, etc
Soft Skills
(Required)
- Excellent communication skills (spoken and written)
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