Product Owner

Product OwnerJob Summary: Talent Software Services is in search of a Product Owner for a contract position in Minnetonka, MN. The opportunity will be seven months with a strong chance for a long-term extension.Position Summary: The Product Owner (PO) within client's IT serves as the liaison between the Delivery Team and their primary business stakeholder(s). The Product Owner is accountable for understanding the strategy and vision of their customer base and ensuring their product backlog of features is prioritized to best support this vision. The PO plays a significant role in delivering high-quality product capability to the business stakeholders. The relationship between the Product Owner and their customer is paramount for product success. Product Owners must be able to clearly communicate, receive feedback, and when necessary challenge appropriately.The Product Owner serves the Delivery Team by ongoing and iterative prioritization of the product backlog, ensuring requirements for user stories/features are complete prior to each sprint, and addresses questions the development team may have in sprint planning and throughout the sprint. The Product Owner is responsible for ensuring the technology life cycle of their product is accounted for and any necessary investments, upgrades, or enhancements are communicated to their customer base and prioritized with new development.The Product Owner, in collaboration with the Scrum Master, is responsible for ensuring quality deliverables at the end of each sprint. As the liaison for the customer, the Product Owner is accountable for determining whether sprint deliverables have met the definition of done or require additional work.Primary Responsibilities/Accountabilities:Product Vision and Roadmap (30%):

• Accountable for understanding their customer's strategic direction and vision and to ensure the Product Roadmap represents work to support that vision. Product Owner must utilize excellent facilitation, critical thinking, communication, conflict resolution, and leadership skills to prioritize across their customer base to ensure features are delivered that offer greatest business value and speed to market. The Product Owner must be comfortable working with all levels within the organization. Technology

• Responsible for ensuring the health of the technology platform and that their products are maintained and enhanced as needed. The Product Owner must exert influence, leadership, critical thinking, and communication skills to ensure their customers understand the value of this work and ensure it is accounted for in the product roadmap.

• Responsible for ensuring the product backlog of features is prioritized on an iterative basis and that this prioritization meets the needs of their customers and is understood by the Scrum Master and Delivery Team. The Product Owner must be resilient and adaptable to account for potentially dynamic changes in their customers' strategies and be able to adapt to these changes while minimizing any impact to productivity for the development team. The PO participates in Product Increment planning, coordinates dependencies across teams, and works with the delivery team to finalize commitments.

• Responsible for ensuring that requirements for each feature are documented and complete prior to the beginning of each sprint. Requirements must be clearly written, testable, and include any relevant material or artifact needed to support quality development and the Quality Assurance testing. The Definition of Done must also be clearly defined in the feature analysis.
• BUDGETARY/FISCAL RESPONSIBILITIES (if any): Responsible for capital and expense product budget

• Major: Business, health care administration, or information systems or equivalent work
• Years of experience required: 5-7 years
• Contact Center technology, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capabilities, Avaya phone systems
• Health Insurance experience (nice to have)
• SAFe Agile
• Ability and desire to work on multiple (5+) projects at a time, ability to adjust priorities, and work with stakeholders across IT and the Business.

• Facilitation, people leadership, conflict resolution skills necessary to develop trusting relationships, elicit business needs, align customer base, and champion value added technology support
• Analysis, prioritization, and critical thinking skills to support roadmap and product prioritization
• Resiliency and adaptability skills to adjust to ever changing business needs
• Industry knowledge of tools, techniques and industry best-practices for estimating services and business consultation.
• Communication (written/verbal) and organizational skills with ability to communicate effectively with various levels of management and also to gain cross functional support for projects
• CERTIFICATIONS/LICENSURE: Scrum Certification, Formal Agile Training, Product Owner Training