Product Owner I

The Product Owner I role is a tactical link between product strategy and engineering execution. You translate product intent into clearly defined, deliverable work items, refine acceptance details, and guide features through release verification in a hybrid environment in Washington, DC.

Backlog Ownership and Story Decomposition

• Own and manage the development team backlog as the primary delivery inventory, including stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, and feature decomposition work.
• Decompose PM-defined Features into individual user stories to ensure approved scope is fully represented across child work items.
• Maintain and prioritize the backlog in partnership with the Product Manager and Engineering Lead.

Acceptance Criteria, Usability Details, and Testable Scope

• Author story-level functional acceptance criteria with observable behaviors, boundary logic, conditional variants, UX copy, field validations, and error states that are specific, testable, and unambiguous.
• Collaborate with Product Designers to incorporate high-fidelity UX specifications, annotated mockups, and interaction behaviors into story acceptance criteria.
• Ensure design intent is captured at the story level so engineering teams can execute without ambiguity.

Planning, Sequencing, and Delivery Alignment

• Partner with Development Leads on high-level story mapping, backlog sequencing, and execution planning to align delivery with release timelines, capacity, and dependencies.
• Ensure story order and timing align with committed deadlines, delivery capacity, and cross-team dependencies.
• Present stories during refinement ceremonies and participate in Monthly Planning, Release Verification, Support Triage, and Backlog Prioritization sessions.

Technical Review, Validation, and Definition of Ready

• Partner with Engineering throughout technical review, architecture validation, and estimation, incorporating technical feedback before stories enter development.
• Own and enforce the team Definition of Ready by validating that stories entering a development pod have locked functional acceptance criteria, annotated UX, technical review sign-off, and feature flag documentation.
• Act as the final functional acceptance authority on individual stories, with Product Manager partnership for major or high-risk features.

Feature Flags, Observability, and Cross-Team Delivery

• Manage the 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.
• Support observability and monitoring requirements for high-risk features by partnering with Engineering to define success metrics and alerting thresholds where applicable.
• Collaborate with other Product Owners across teams when features span multiple domains to ensure consistent scope coverage, dependency alignment, and synchronized delivery timelines.

Documentation Support and Release Verification

• Assist Technical Writing and Learning teams with documentation and user-facing guides as features move toward general availability.
• Drive features from definition through release verification as part of the team delivery workflow.
• Serve as the day-to-day decision-maker on scope, story sequencing, and functional completeness within the team’s delivery process.

Required 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 4 years relevant experience
• Experience in business analysis, product ownership, or a similar role within a software product organization
• Direct experience writing user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional specifications

Technologies

• Jira
• Confluence

Benefits

• A competitive salary and benefits package that recognizes your contribution
• Opportunities to grow your skills and build your career within a global business
• Access to learning, development and on-the-job experiences that expand your expertise
• A supportive, inclusive team environment where your ideas and input matter
• Time to give back through community and charity initiatives
• A global employee assistance program to support your wellbeing
• Recognition through a global platform that celebrates your achievements
• https://jobs.globalpayments.com/en/why-global-payments/benefits/