Product Owner

Do you have a passion for children and education? Would you like to positively impact families in need of help? We want to speak with you!

Step Up For Students empowers families to pursue and engage in the most appropriate learning options for their children.

 Step Up For Students offers an excellent benefits package:
 
SUFS Total Rewards 
 

Medical - HSA/FSA - Dental - Vision     
Company Paid Disability - Life Insurance
401K Match - Tuition Reimbursement

Generous Time off Policy -  Professional Development 

Position Overview

The Product Owner will apply methodologies to drive product delight and delivery from initiation through implementation to ensure successful delivery of features.  This position will work across the organization to engage appropriate internal and external partners to assure successful analysis, option determination and tactical execution.

Essential Functions

• Responsible for defining and adapting the product vision resulting in success of product and providing metrics to demonstrate;
• Incorporates feature request into the product roadmap;
• Drives planning and collaborates with team to establish timelines;
• Maintains the product roadmap and release plans ensuring alignment with company mission and goals;
• Owns alignment of software development and business resources on goals and priorities;
• Communicates all priority changes to the impacted teams;
• Measures progress to roadmap and the release schedule;
• Performs progress reporting such as burn up/down charts and communicates risks;
• Works with cross-functional teams across the organization to bring stakeholder consensus of product features and functionality;
• Leads personal journey mapping to better understand purpose and intended use of product and function by each persona;
• Designs products with alignment of organizational and product strategy as set up cross-functional leadership teams;
• Develops epics, features and user stories to implement product enhancements and specifies acceptance criteria;
• Grooms and prioritizes the product backlog, manages dependencies and sets the sprint goal;
• Works with stakeholders and team to mitigate risks and remove roadblocks;
• Participates in daily stand up meetings, retrospective meetings and assists with process improvement;
• Assists with user acceptance testing and rollout documentation;
• Responsible for budget and shares cost information;
• Performs feasibility analysis and measures ROI and ensures value to organization;

• Regularly initiates collaboration with stakeholders to understand business problems and product needs;
• Owns team responsible for product and drives to success;
• Customer advocate in development of solutions;
• Delivers informative and well‐organized presentations and briefings to management;
• Be able to clearly understand organizational culture and mission to best deliver upon with roles and responsibilities;

The above is not an all-inclusive list of all duties performed by this job title, only a representative summary of the primary duties and responsibilities.  Incumbent may be required to perform other additional duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

Three (3) years of experience as a Product Owner.  An equivalent years of work experience, including college courses of a degree in Business or Information Technology.  Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO), or Certified SAFe Product Owner. 

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

Prior experience as a Product Owner with experience on agile teams with proven record of delivery and product successes in previous positions;

• Familiarity with Microsoft Azure DevOps or similar Agile toolsets
• Hands-on experience managing all stages of the product life cycle;
• Technical background with knowledge of software development and web technologies;
• Able to quickly understand the functionality of a product;
• Experience with project initiation and funding processes (scope, high level estimates, value statement creation);
• In-depth understanding of Agile methodologies, technical understanding of products, and up-to-date on industry standards and best practices;
• Analytical skills to identify and solve complex problems;
• Proven ability to write strong user stories and epics;
• Proven ability to create user journey on tools such as Figma or Adobe XD or similar;
• Ability to assess risk and identify key stakeholders necessary to remove barriers;
• Strong at delivering executive level project presentations;
• Clear communication skills with the ability to engage, influence, and inspire and drive collaboration and alignment;
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills;
• Accurate and precise attention to detail;
• Able to build strong interpersonal relationships with cross-functional teams across the organization, internal and external stakeholders and users;
• Experience with documenting project budgets (in collaboration with various resources) and working with teams to refine and adjust;
• Comfortable working with multiple teams, in-house and remote; strong team player;
• Comfortable with making decisions with some level of uncertainty;

Core Values

Step Up For Students believes strongly in two key core values:

• Everyone is an asset.
• Every event is an improvement opportunity.

To maintain a positive and effective organizational culture, employees are expected to demonstrate these values in their everyday work.

Physical Demands

This position regularly requires the abilities of sitting, manual dexterity, grasping, talking, hearing, seeing and repetitive motions.

Work Environment

This position is an office environment with very limited exposure to any outside fumes, odors, heat and/or weather conditions.