Product Owner I

The Product Owner I role serves as a practical link between product strategy and technical execution. The position translates product vision into well-defined deliverable work items by owning the development team backlog, refining stories for readiness, and coordinating across stakeholders to align delivery with the product roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Owns and manages the development team backlog, including stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, support-driven work, and feature decomposition.
• Ensures the backlog stays healthy, current, prioritized, and aligned with Product Manager priorities, committed deadlines, delivery capacity, and cross-team dependencies.
• Supports the product development team by reducing churn and waste, removing blockers, and ensuring work enters development with sufficient definition.
• Decomposes Product Manager-defined Features into individual user stories, ensuring child work items fully cover the approved scope.
• Authors story-level functional acceptance criteria covering observable behaviors, boundary logic, conditional variants, UX copy, field validations, and error states that are specific, testable, and unambiguous.
• Partners with Development Leads on story mapping, backlog sequencing, and execution planning to align delivery with release timelines, capacity, and dependencies.
• Collaborates with Product Designers to incorporate high-fidelity UX specifications, annotated mockups, and interaction behaviors into story acceptance criteria.
• Ensures engineering teams can execute without ambiguity by capturing design intent at the story level.
• 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 each story entering a development pod includes clear functional acceptance criteria, required UX context, technical review input, dependency awareness, and applicable feature flag documentation.
• Acts as the final functional acceptance authority on individual stories, with Product Manager partnership on major, high-risk, or strategically significant features.
• Drives refinement and delivery readiness ceremonies by presenting stories, clarifying expected behavior, resolving open questions, and confirming shared understanding of business rules and functional outcomes.
• Participates in Monthly Planning, Release Verification, Support Triage, and Backlog Prioritization sessions to keep execution aligned with product priorities and operational needs.
• Manages story-level feature flag lifecycle, including documentation of flag states, creation of cleanup tickets after release, and coordination with Release Management on staged rollout configurations.
• Supports observability and monitoring needs for high-risk features by partnering with Engineering to define success metrics and alerting thresholds where applicable.
• Collaborates with other Product Owners across teams for features spanning multiple domains, ensuring consistent scope coverage, dependency alignment, and synchronized timelines.
• Coordinates with QA, Release Management, Technical Writing, Learning, Support, and other stakeholders to support release readiness, documentation, training, and adoption.
• Continuously improves delivery practices by identifying process gaps, proposing workflow enhancements, and maintaining clear documentation for repeatable execution.

Requirements

• 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 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.

Desired Skills and Capabilities

• Strong analytical and backlog decomposition skills, able to break complex features into discrete, independently deliverable user stories while keeping focus on overall team priorities.
• Deep understanding of functional specification writing, including business rules, edge cases, error handling, and testable acceptance criteria.
• Working knowledge of software development practices to collaborate effectively with engineering on feasibility, sequencing, architecture considerations, release readiness, and operational impacts.
• Cross-functional facilitation skills to balance input from Product Management, Design, Engineering, QA, Release Management, Support, and other stakeholders to reduce churn, remove blockers, and support predictable delivery.
• Ability to evaluate multiple functional scenarios, system interactions, user workflows, delivery dependencies, and operational constraints when shaping complex backlog priorities.
• Judgment in acceptance criteria scope, story sequencing, backlog prioritization trade-offs, and readiness decisions.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity by researching, asking clarifying questions, facilitating alignment, and proposing solutions.
• Ability to coordinate across teams and stakeholders for features spanning domain boundaries or requiring synchronized execution.
• 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 delivery workflow and may coordinate other personnel for refinement, story mapping, dependency planning, release verification, and backlog governance activities.

Tools and Technologies

• Jira
• Confluence

Location and Work Mode

Jeffersonville, IN (onsite)

Experience Level

Minimum 6 years of experience.