Product Owner (Work from Home)

Job Family

Agile Leadership

Job Description Summary

The Product Owner (PO) develops and communicates their product’s vision to be fulfilled by their agile team(s). The PO is the team’s key stakeholder who serves as proxy for the customer, both internal and external, and effectively engages other stakeholders, including other POs, to define and prioritize deliverables for their agile teams. The PO has a significant role in quality control and is empowered to accept work as done. The PO is dedicated to fulfilling these responsibilities and participates in one or two agile teams. The PO works closely with the team to align around objectives, incentives, and culture, and also engages critical stakeholders and customers to inform their product’s vision and backlog as a means to help the organization achieve business agility.

Job Description

Global Technology Services (GTS) is Aegon’s global IT partner that provides infrastructure services, information security and global/corporate application support for Aegon’s businesses around the world.

From 6 locations in the US, the Netherlands, UK, and Hungary, we support 20+ country units and 24000+ employees in the world. Our support consists of a wide range of centralized global IT services such as programming, database management, project management, agile/dev/ops, and more.
We continue to maximize the value from having a clear digital and data technology platform strategy that extends our ecosystem, as an approach to digitization, enhancing customer experience, and improving operational efficiency.
All of these teams work closely together to provide innovative and digital solutions as well as critical technology support. This is essential for enabling Aegon’s businesses around the globe to be innovative, digital and competitive, efficient, and effective, and to provide the best solutions and customer experience for our customers and shareholders.

Responsibilities

• Research and evaluate market-based and customer-inspired insights that inform the product’s vision and comprehensive strategy planning.
• Provide vision and serve as a champion of customer perspectives to the Agile team in the form of clearly written epics, themes and user stories each with clear acceptance criteria in collaboration with the team. Help the team make business trade-offs between near term and longer term product goals.  Provide leadership to make the hard calls on scope and competing priorities while realistically manage stakeholder demands.
• Establish and prioritize the product roadmap and its backlog in collaboration with the team.
• Collaborate proactively in ceremonies with UI/UX team, product scrum team, and other product owners to maintain the product roadmap, business outcomes, and goals.
• Lead regular backlog refinement workshops to help estimate relative feature value and update delivery forecasts to aid prioritization, minimize oversubscription of delivery teams and manage stakeholder expectations.
• Ensure product aligns with company strategy and broader product strategies through regular communication with customers, stakeholders and product management. Coordinate with the Scrum Master to facilitate short feedback loops between delivery teams and stakeholders through frequent deliveries and sharing of lessons learned.
• Engage in scaled agile practices and coordinate with other Product owners (as needed) to promote cross-team alignment around product roadmaps and dependencies.
• Lead product release planning with technical and business stakeholders and set expectation for delivery of new functionalities.
• Participate in system demos at the end of the iteration and provide story/feature acceptance per the pre-agreed “Definition of Done” criteria.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, or experience work in a related field.
• Solid understanding of the product lifecycle.
• In-depth experience with agile methodologies, technical understanding of products, and up-to-date on industry standards and best practices.
• Comfortable working with multiple teams, in-house and remote.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Accurate and precise attention to detail.
• Able to build strong interpersonal relationships with business analysts, UI/UX team, leadership, senior management, and internal and external stakeholders.
• Experience with JIRA, or a similar agile product management toolset.
• Proficient computer skills, Microsoft Office Suite; working knowledge of software development.

Preferred Qualifications

• Five years of related work experience.
• Product Owner certification (e.g. CSPO, SAFe POPM).
• Experience with Keyfactor or other certificate management tool.
• Knowledge of web hosting, WAP or public key infrastructure.
• Track record of continued and recent education in agile, including training, conferences, user groups and self-study.
• Knowledge of approaches discussed in the agile space: XP, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, Crystal, FDD, etc.
• Experience as a collaborative leader.

**Please note that the compensation information that follows is a good faith estimate for this position only and is provided pursuant to applicable pay transparency and compensation posting laws. It is

estimated based on what a successful candidate might be paid in certain Company locations.**

Compensation

The US salary for this position generally ranges between $104,800 – $144,000 annually. This range is an estimate, based on potential employee qualifications and operational needs. Salary may vary above and below the stated amounts, as permitted by applicable law.

Additionally in the US, this position is typically eligible for an Annual Bonus based on the Company Bonus Plan/Individual Performance and is at the Company’s discretion.

Our commitment to inclusion & diversity means that we value differences. We encourage the unique perspectives of persons and are dedicated to creating a respectful and inclusive work environment.

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