Business Product Owner Lead, PET Insurance

Serve as the Product Owner for a Data & Analytics scrum team supporting Nationwide’s Pet line. This role connects business outcomes to IT execution, emphasizing analytics, reporting, and data-driven capabilities, while also flexing into business analysis, business project management, UAT planning and execution, and business process and performance analysis as priorities shift.

Primary Responsibilities: Product Ownership

• Own the product vision, roadmap, and prioritized backlog for Pet analytics capabilities as Product Owner for the Data & Analytics scrum team.
• Work with business leaders and stakeholders to define analytics business outcomes, success measures, and value priorities.
• Elicit, document, and refine requirements using epics, features, and user stories, including clear acceptance criteria.
• Continuously prioritize backlog items using business value, risk, dependencies, and capacity, balancing immediate needs with longer-term objectives.
• Participate in agile ceremonies, including backlog refinement, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
• Collaborate with data engineers, analysts, architects, and delivery partners to clarify intent, resolve trade-offs, and support delivery efficiency.
• Ensure delivered solutions align with business requirements, usability expectations, and data quality and governance standards.
• Support stakeholder communication, alignment, and change readiness related to analytics delivery.

Additional Responsibilities and Business Transformation Support

• Analyze current and future-state business processes, data needs, and decision workflows.
• Translate complex business problems into actionable requirements and insights.
• Support planning, coordination, and execution of business-led initiatives, including scope, timelines, milestones, risks, and dependencies.
• Provide status updates and stakeholder communication as needed.
• Develop UAT strategies, test scenarios, and acceptance criteria for analytics solutions.
• Coordinate business UAT execution, manage defects, and support readiness for production release.
• Support business sign-off prior to deployment.
• Define KPIs, dashboards, and reporting requirements with stakeholders.
• Use analytics outputs to identify performance gaps and improvement opportunities.
• Support continuous improvement and benefits realization efforts.
• Partner with senior leaders to transform businesses through people, process, and technology applied to business strategy.
• Identify complexities, dependencies, and duplications during planning.
• Demonstrate expertise in business process analysis and design, organizational analysis, needs assessments, and cost/benefit analysis aligned to business strategy.
• Consult with functional groups within Nationwide Technology and internal business clients to develop short- and long-term business transformation plans.
• Contribute to process management as a consultant between business customers and systems teams for development and implementation of business processes and procedures.
• Communicate to customers, management, and external sources.
• Identify critical elements of business processes that need to be managed and define criteria of performance success, with cohesive reporting of performance.
• Contribute to analysis and design of organizational structures, roles, responsibilities, governance, staffing, and sourcing to support business goals and process architecture.
• Provide significant contribution in executing business unit level change and support training of customers on business, technological, societal, and environmental trends to improve business performance.
• Facilitate evaluation and research of new and existing products, procedures, or workflow needs tied to business systems.
• Evaluate new technologies and evolving business requirements and recommend systems alternatives and enhancements.
• Develop business cases, including gaining senior management input, to accomplish business objectives.
• Identify, assess, and mitigate business risks associated with current operating models and/or desired target state operating models.
• May provide direction, training, and guidance to less experienced staff, assign responsibility for tasks, set objectives, monitor progress, and oversee results.
• May monitor project schedules and costs, and develop project plans, work breakdown structures, and desired outcomes for overall solution delivery.
• Perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Primary Requirements

• Knowledge and experience delivering data and analytics solutions, including reporting, dashboards, insights, or data-driven capabilities supporting business decision-making.
• Experience with data governance concepts, including data quality, controls, standards, and business ownership of data assets.
• Familiarity with data integration patterns and ETL processes, translating business needs into analytics-ready data solutions.
• Experience supporting or working with EDI and API-based file transfer and integration solutions.
• Working knowledge of data lake and data warehouse architectures, reporting platforms, and analytics ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of agile and product-centric delivery practices, including experience working on or with scrum teams.
• Ability to partner across business and technology teams and influence outcomes without direct authority.
• Strong communication skills, translating between technical concepts and business priorities.
• Undergraduate studies in computer science, management information, business, mathematics, or related field desired; graduate studies preferred.
• Eight plus years of dynamic experience planning, designing, and implementing company-wide business transformation initiatives.
• Extensive experience with functional, process, information, and data modeling, data management and warehousing, and applications integration.
• In-depth experience with process redesign methods and tools.
• Three years of project management experience preferred.
• Demonstrated knowledge of standards, methodologies, and frameworks, business process management, and technology.
• Sound knowledge of a variety of tools, concepts, and techniques, including understanding of new technologies and developments in the technology industry.
• Detailed knowledge of the system development life cycle, along with knowledge of project management concepts and techniques.
• Thorough knowledge of facilitation, performance management, organizational design, and managing organization change.
• Ability to lead large or sophisticated projects and communicate effectively in ambiguous environments.

Technologies

• ETL
• EDI
• API
• Data lake
• Data warehouse

Education

Undergraduate studies in computer science, management information, business, mathematics, or a related field are desired; graduate studies are preferred.

Role Details

• Location: California (remote)
• Reporting relationship: Reports to Director
• Type: Individual contributor role; does not have direct reports (may have opportunity to lead projects or teams)
• Overtime eligibility: Exempt (Not eligible)
• Working conditions: Normal office environment; extended work hours may be required based on workload; may require occasional travel

Compensation and Benefits

• Medical/dental/vision
• Life insurance
• Short and long term disability coverage
• Paid time off: newly hired associates receive a minimum of 18 days paid time off each full calendar year, pro-rated quarterly based on hire date
• Nine paid holidays
• 8 hours of Lifetime paid time off
• 8 hours of Unity Day paid time off
• 401(k) with company match
• Company-paid pension plan
• Business casual attire

Additional Program Information

This role does not qualify for employer sponsored work authorization. Nationwide does not participate in the STEM OPT extension program.