Agile Product Owner II - Individual Markets

Overview

Individual Markets Business Technology Services - at Guardian is seeking a Product Owner to join our dynamic team and play a pivotal role in shaping the success of our products within the Individual Markets organization.

This position will play a key role in delivering integrated solutions and services that meet business initiatives, product launches, process improvements, and strategic objectives, by eliciting, defining, and prioritizing business requirements, translating business requirements into technical system requirements, along with managing root cause analysis and issue resolution.

You Will (Responsibilities):

• Analyze, decompose and elicit business requirements into small, estimated, functional, user stories.
• Define functional and non-functional requirements.
• Prioritize and sequence stories to improve business value delivered while maintaining a sustainable pace for the team.
• Works with Product Management Team to ensure vision, goals, and objectives are established and achieved.
• Develop an overall understanding of appropriate business processes and workflows.
• Collaborate with Product vendor and QA, to support enhancements.
• Manage team dependencies, collaborating with Product Manager and other Product Owners.
• Accept user stories as done throughout the iteration with multiple define-build-test cycles.
• Participating in team and Agile Release Train (ART) Agile Ceremonies
• Apply an Agile approach and behavior to effectively collaborate with the Agile Release Train (ART), team and stakeholder(s).
• Lead estimation, forecasting and prioritization for an Agile team.
• Make critical decisions regarding functionality and priority for the team with a focus on delivering value.
• Use various tools including personas to guide design choices, empathy maps to help teams understand user needs, journey maps to describe customer experiences across the operational value stream & story maps to design workflows.
• Translate business requirements into technical specifications and user stories. Requirements could include but are not limited to:
• Data Mapping
• Data configuration
• UI/Business configurations (Screen/Workflows)
• Product mapping/configurations
• Business & System rules
• You will create/maintain Master Technical requirement documentation.
• Provide in-depth and sophisticated analyses with interpretive thinking to define problems, develop innovative solutions and influence strategic functional decisions
• You will identify project tasks required to support successful implementation, including performing impact analysis, verbally communicating complex issues, validating production readiness and communicating implementation statuses.
• You may engage with various areas to resolve problems in production and non-production environments as they arise.
• Participate in design sessions to ensure business process requirements translate into technical requirements, including user stories, use cases, design specifications, business process, data flows and acceptance criteria when applicable
• You will perform Unit testing as needed

You Have (Your Qualifications)

• Strong business domain understanding of New Business
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Business Administration or equivalent educational or professional experience and/or qualifications.
• 8 + years of product owner, business analyst or system analyst experience in an agile environment
• Knowledge of Agile Values, Principles, and Mindset
• Consumer centric focus with experience managing user experience components
• Demonstrated track record in effective requirement elicitation and analysis
• Must be able to think strategically and evaluate short-, medium-, and long-term options
• Self-directed and proactive, able to think beyond the immediate challenge and anticipate using exceptional judgment and problem-solving abilities.
• Demonstrate strong methodical analytical skills considering different data points, patterns, trends, and/or themes to support system requirements and identify root cause and issue resolution
• Excellent written and verbal communications, organization, analytical, planning and leadership skills.
• Strong management, communication, technical and remote collaboration skills.
• Excellent team collaboration skills, to include experience in dealing with multiple projects impacting different processes within the Individual Markets ‘arena’, multi-functional teams, and ability to coordinate across teams in a large matrix organization environment.
• Ability to learn and maintain a comprehensive understanding of Guardian’s business and technology.
• Strong relationship building and maintaining skills. Fosters a climate conducive to establishing positive working relationships with clients (internal and external).
• Working knowledge of Confluence, Jira, Jira Align, MS project, MS Office Suite, and Visio
• Certified in Scaled Agile – SAFe Product owner (PO/PM) preferred, but not mandatory
• Ability to travel up to 10%

Location

• Three days a week at a Guardian office in Bethlehem, PA, Holmdel, NJ or New York, NY.

Salary Range:

The salary range reflected above is a good faith estimate of base pay for the primary location of the position. The salary for this position ultimately will be determined based on the education, experience, knowledge, and abilities of the successful candidate. In addition to salary, this role may also be eligible for annual, sales, or other incentive compensation.

Our Promise

At Guardian, you’ll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals.  Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards.

Inspire Well-Being

As part of Guardian’s Purpose – to inspire well-being – we are committed to offering contemporary, supportive, flexible, and inclusive benefits and resources to our colleagues. Explore our company benefits at www.guardianlife.com/careers/corporate/benefits. Benefits apply to full-time eligible employees. Interns are not eligible for most Company benefits.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Guardian is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to age, race, color, creed, religion, sex, affectional or sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, marital status, disability, military or veteran status, or any other classification protected by applicable law.

Accommodations

Guardian is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. Guardian also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified job applicants (and employees) to accommodate the individual's known limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, unless doing so would create an undue hardship. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact applicant_accommodation@glic.com.

Current Guardian Colleagues: Please apply through the internal Jobs Hub in Workday.