Product Owner I

Summary of This Role

Serves as the tactical bridge between product strategy and technical execution, translating product vision into clearly defined, deliverable work items. Owns and manages the development team’s backlog as the primary working inventory for delivery, ensuring stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, and feature work are clearly understood, prioritized, refined, and ready for execution. Partners closely with Product Managers, Product Designers, Engineering Leads, QA, Release Management, and other stakeholders to reduce churn and waste, remove blockers, and drive features from definition through release verification. Operates as the day-to-day decision-maker on story-level scope, backlog sequencing, functional completeness, and delivery readiness within the team’s workflow, while aligning to product strategy and roadmap direction set by Product Management.

What Part Will You Play?

• Owns and manages the development team’s backlog, including stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, support-driven work, and feature decomposition work. Ensures the backlog is healthy, current, prioritized, and aligned with Product Manager priorities, committed deadlines, delivery capacity, and cross-team dependencies. Champions and supports the product development team by reducing churn and waste, removing blockers, and ensuring work is sufficiently defined before entering development.

• Decomposes Product Manager-defined Features into individual user stories, ensuring complete coverage of approved scope across child work items. Authors story-level functional acceptance criteria including observable behaviors, boundary logic, conditional variants, UX copy, field validations, and error states that are specific, testable, and unambiguous. Partners with Development Leads on high-level story mapping, backlog sequencing, and execution planning to align delivery with release timelines, capacity, and dependencies.

• Collaborates with Product Designers to embed high-fidelity UX specifications, annotated mockups, and interaction behaviors into story acceptance criteria. Ensures design intent is fully captured at the story level so engineering teams can execute without ambiguity. Partners with Engineering throughout technical review, architecture validation, and estimation, incorporating technical feedback before stories enter development.

• Owns and enforces the team Definition of Ready, validating that every story entering a development pod has clear functional acceptance criteria, required UX context, technical review input, dependency awareness, and applicable feature flag documentation. Serves as the final functional acceptance authority on individual stories, with Product Manager partnership on major, high-risk, or strategically significant features.

• Drives story refinement and delivery readiness ceremonies by presenting stories, clarifying expected behavior, resolving open questions, and ensuring the team understands business rules and functional outcomes. Participates in Monthly Planning, Release Verification, Support Triage, and Backlog Prioritization sessions to keep delivery execution aligned with product priorities and operational needs.

• Manages feature flag lifecycle at the story level, including documentation of flag states, creation of cleanup tickets after release, and coordination with Release Management on staged rollout configurations. Supports observability and monitoring requirements for high-risk features by partnering with Engineering to define success metrics and alerting thresholds where applicable.

• Collaborates with other Product Owners across teams when features span multiple domains, ensuring consistent scope coverage, dependency alignment, and synchronized delivery timelines. Coordinates with QA, Release Management, Technical Writing, Learning, Support, and other stakeholders as needed to support release readiness, documentation, training, and adoption.

• Continuously improves team delivery practices by identifying process gaps, proposing workflow enhancements, and maintaining clear documentation for repeatable execution.

What Are We Looking For in This Role?

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree

• Relevant experience or degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field; combination of relevant training and/or experience in lieu of degree

• Typically minimum 6-8 years relevant experience

• Experience in business analysis, product ownership, product delivery, or a similar role within a software product organization

• Direct experience owning or managing a development team backlog, writing user stories, defining acceptance criteria, and creating functional specifications

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in an Agile delivery environment such as Scrum or Kanban with hands-on backlog management responsibilities

• Experience in payments, POS, or fintech product domains

• Experience with Jira and Confluence for backlog management, workflow tracking, and documentation

• Prior experience collaborating directly with UX or Product Design teams to translate mockups, interaction flows, and user experience requirements into functional delivery requirements

• Experience partnering with engineering teams on technical review, estimation, sequencing, dependency management, release readiness, and defect triage

• CSPO, PSPO, or equivalent Product Owner certification

What Are Our Desired Skills and Capabilities?

Skills / Knowledge

Possesses strong analytical, backlog management, and decomposition skills, with the ability to break complex product features into discrete, independently deliverable user stories while maintaining a clear view of overall team priorities. Demonstrates deep understanding of functional specification writing, including business rules, edge cases, error handling, and testable acceptance criteria. Maintains working knowledge of software development practices sufficient to collaborate effectively with engineering teams on technical feasibility, sequencing, architecture considerations, release readiness, and operational impacts. Skilled in cross-functional facilitation, balancing input from Product Management, Design, Engineering, QA, Release Management, Support, and other stakeholders to drive alignment, reduce churn, remove blockers, and support predictable delivery.

Job Complexity

Works on complex product features and backlog priorities requiring evaluation of multiple functional scenarios, system interactions, user workflows, delivery dependencies, operational constraints, and stakeholder needs. Exercises judgment in defining acceptance criteria scope, story sequencing, backlog prioritization trade-offs, and readiness decisions. Navigates ambiguity in requirements by proactively researching, asking clarifying questions, facilitating alignment, and proposing solutions rather than escalating gaps. Coordinates across multiple teams and stakeholders when features span domain boundaries or require synchronized execution.

Supervision

Works under general direction of the Product Manager for strategic priorities, product roadmap alignment, and feature-level scope decisions. Operates with significant autonomy on development team backlog management, story-level decisions, backlog ordering, refinement readiness, and day-to-day delivery coordination. Determines methods and procedures for new assignments within the team’s delivery workflow and may coordinate activities of other personnel during refinement, story mapping, dependency planning, release verification, and backlog governance activities.