Product Owner- DevOpsA full time member of an agile team, the Product Owner (PO) works with Product Management and other stakeholders to define and prioritize User and Enabler Stories in the Team Backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities. The Team Backlog contains all the items the team needs to do to advance their portion of the system’s functionality. Stories are the fundamental mechanism to describe a small piece of desired functionality that will be incrementally implemented by the team as part of the Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) to provide business value to the end user. The PO owns the Team Backlog and its implementation. The PO contributes to the vision and refinement of the Program Backlog, serves as the main source for story detail and priorities for each Program Iteration and is responsible for iteration plan acceptance, story acceptance criteria and acceptance of stories as done. The PO role requires an individual with strong collaborative skills with a system’s thinking mentality who can work with technical and nontechnical stakeholders to continually ensure their team is executing the highest priority, value added work.

Primary Responsibilities:

Working with all teams in the Engineering Operations groups to help manage backlogs in the following functional areas:

The work is diverse and each team will have different workflows for managing the work. The PO is expected to understand what type of work is carried out by EO teams and how that work is carried out. With this knowledge, the PO will help the team manage their backlogs by entering stories conforming to organizational standards and ensure that all dependent work is also captured on other team’s boards (including those outside of the EO group). The PO will be instrumental in helping teams decide what work to pull when based on several variables which include ROI, size of the work, dependencies, and business priorities. The PO will participate in team stand-ups and help teams adhere to basic lean principles such as managing to WIP, cataloging blockers with sufficient details, and ensuring that stories are being transitioned properly across team boards. This will improve our operational metrics reporting. PO will assist management in preparing for operational reviews. PO should be able to obtain operational metrics and contribute to narrative behind those metrics. Metrics expected are:

Desired Skills and Experience

  • Production Operations (break-fix, deployments, admin)
  • Performance Engineering (end-to-end performance)
  • Site Reliability (real-time monitoring of live systems)
  • Infrastructure Automation (provisioning of VM)
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Release Engineering
  • Continuous Integration
  • Lead Time (for each type of work)
  • Cycle Time
  • Stage Cycle Time
  • Flow Efficiency
  • Passion for Lean: Appreciates the depths of Lean practices and principles and role models Lean and Agile behaviors.
  • Continuous Planning & Execution: Engages with team members, Product Management, Technology and other stakeholders to ensure the team backlog is defined, prioritized, understood and implemented and effectively addresses program priorities.
  • Collaboration:  Breaks down silos and works effectively with team members, cross functional teams and various stakeholders to establish and accomplish team and ART priorities/objectives.
  • Negotiating and Consensus Building: Continuously aligns services offered with technology groups and business owners.  Manages, negotiates and coordinates with technology, business stakeholders, subject matter experts and architects on release planning prioritization of strategic technology initiatives.
  • Requirements Analysis: Gathers, organizes and evaluates any information or data needed as input from stakeholders and development team to determine requirements and specifications.
  • Communication: Excellent verbal, written and presentation skills with ability to communicate technical concepts to technical and non-technical professionals.
  • Team Builder: Uses appropriate methods and a flexible interpersonal style to help build a cohesive team and facilitates the completion of team and ART objectives.
  • Technical Acumen: Understanding of system and solution architect/engineering at a level to assist with decision making and sequencing of key technological infrastructures that are needed to execute dependent user stories.
  • 1-3 years of technology planning experience
  • 1+ years of experience with AWS Cloud computing
  • 3+ years of experience with Excel
  • Tableau Experience
  • Working with SAFe