Product Owner

MISSION

The mission for this role is to guide our clients to the best strategic product decisions for their unique organization and business goals.

Product Owners at Metal Toad connect and translate between client business needs and technology solutions. You speak business value and are fluent in user stories. You bring a global view of development processes to your work, assisting in the creation of strategic vision and program development.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Leadership
- Excels in striking a balance in focus between engineering, business strategy and human relationships.
- Maintaining awareness of both the external and internal competitive landscape, opportunities for expansion, customers, markets, new industry developments and standards.
- Maintain a positive and respectful tone in all interactions.

Product Owner
- Work with the development team on the most elegant way to architect the solution driven by your intimate understanding of client needs and requirements.
- Ensure requirements are fully understood and that implementation plans match expectations.
- Assess and address technical risks.
- Understand and analyze data pipelines, algorithms, and automated systems.
- Assess and address technical risks.
- Understand and analyze data pipelines, algorithms, and automated systems, create diagrams to ensure alignment and manage expectations.
- Identify and articulate client business needs and opportunities for growth.
- Serve as a trusted advisor for client’s technology strategy, including product planning, strategic roadmapping, and release planning.
- Act as a Product Owner developing, maintaining, and refining a backlog in Jira.
- Serve on a scrum team, representing business needs to the developers and ensuring tickets are completed successfully.
- Craft product narrative, and be able to represent narrative to client and stakeholders.
- Surface product risks, and identify tactics to address them
- Balance mastery of technological craft with your empathy for clients.
- Serve as a guide and advisor to clients to move them forward.
- Educate and align the development teams on client requirements, and serve as the client’s proxy with the development teams during the build cycles.
- Becomes familiar with all competing technology in order to speak to its strengths and weaknesses.

QUALIFICATIONS

Required
- _Global requirements above, and..._
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent professional experience
- Proven ability to build relationships with a diverse set of people: including senior level executives, R&D, product management, legal, finance, sales and marketing experts within large Fortune 500 organizations.
- Can clearly and concisely synthesize/communicate complex requirements, and/or organizational problems and propose solutions while working through complicated, matrixed decision paths.
- Have a strong technical understanding to collaborate with Software Engineers on systems integrations, while bringing in your product mindset and customer obsession to validate Engineering decisions. You have heard of frameworks like React, Vue or Angular, know micro services and can articulate technical problems well to non-technical colleagues and stakeholders.
- Professional use of technology backlog processes and backlog tools, like Jira.
- Ability to confidently lead a group in white boarding, concepting and prioritization exercises.
- Ability to lead cross functional business and technical teams to provide timely issue resolution.