A
Product Owner
Apolis
🇺🇸 United States
Hybrid
Manager or above
1 month ago
$60 – $61 / hour
- Agile
- PeopleSoft
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Jira
- Confluence
- Asana
1 month ago
Location: HYBRID position requiring 2 in-office days at local client office per week
Contract: 6+ Months
The Product Owner is responsible for the day-to-day delivery of digital finance capabilities within the Corporate Finance Portfolio. This role translates product strategy and business outcomes into a prioritized, delivery-ready product backlog, enabling cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality capabilities that improve finance processes, controls, decision support, and reporting.
The Product Owner will work across Core Finance, Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Expenditure Management, Branch Economics, Financial Advisor Compensation, and Financial Advisor Teaming and Partnerships. The role partners closely with Product Management, Finance stakeholders, Engineering, Operations, Risk, Compliance, and Legal to define value, clarify requirements, manage dependencies, and ensure release readiness.
Key Responsibilities
Product Backlog Ownership and Prioritization
• Own, prioritize, refine, and maintain the team product backlog for assigned Digital Finance capabilities and value streams.
• Translate portfolio and product strategy into well-defined features, epics, user stories, defects, and enablers aligned to firm objectives and business needs.
• Develop clear acceptance criteria, non-functional requirements, control requirements, and audit considerations for planned scope.
• Ensure backlog items are appropriately refined, sized, sequenced, and dependency-aware before sprint and Program Increment planning.
• Make timely prioritization and scope trade-off decisions across customer value, business outcomes, technical feasibility, risk, and regulatory requirements.
Discovery, Value Definition, and Outcome Management
• Partner with Finance stakeholders and Product Management to identify, assess, and size opportunities.
• Document problem statements, value hypotheses, expected benefits, assumptions, risks, dependencies, and business case inputs.
• Define and socialize success measures for backlog items, including adoption, usability, process efficiency, control effectiveness, cycle time, and defect trends.
• Assess outcomes after release using quantitative data and stakeholder feedback; use findings to refine the backlog and future priorities.
Agile Delivery and Release Readiness
• Lead backlog refinement with engineers, business analysts, and technical leads to clarify requirements, solution constraints, sequencing, and technical enablers.
• Enable effective sprint execution by establishing sprint goals, resolving requirement ambiguity, managing scope changes, and maintaining a clear decision log.
• Support Program Increment planning by presenting team scope, negotiating dependencies, developing capacity-based scope proposals, and contributing to team PI objectives.
• Coordinate testing, business acceptance, release readiness, and operational handoffs for delivered capabilities.
• Convert sprint review feedback and delivery learnings into actionable backlog updates and continuous-improvement opportunities.
Stakeholder Alignment and Governance
• Build alignment across Finance, Technology, Operations, Compliance, Legal, Risk, and Agile Release Train stakeholders.
• Facilitate decisions on complex enhancements and new capabilities, ensuring clarity on scope, controls, dependencies, risks, and delivery implications.
• Communicate backlog priorities, delivery progress, key decisions, risks, impediments, and release plans to product leadership and ART stakeholders.
• Ensure delivery teams maintain transparent visibility into control requirements, dependencies, and material delivery risks.
Required Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, Finance, or a related field; MBA or advanced degree preferred.
• Five or more years of experience as a Product Owner or in a closely related role, such as Product Delivery Manager, Business Analyst, or Product Manager, delivering digital products or capabilities.
• Deep expertise with Peoplesoft Finance and/or accounting principles
• Demonstrated experience owning and managing a product backlog for one or more Agile delivery teams, including prioritization, refinement, sprint planning, and release planning.
• Strong ability to translate business and product goals into clear epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, and definitions of ready and done.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, organizational, and decision-making capabilities, including the ability to structure ambiguous problems and make sound trade-offs.
• Experience defining and using outcome and delivery metrics to guide prioritization and measure post-release performance.
• Proven ability to influence and align cross-functional stakeholders without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex business, process, and technical topics.
• Practical experience with Agile delivery methodologies, including SAFe, Scrum, and/or Kanban.
• Working knowledge of digital finance platforms, integrations, and enterprise architecture concepts.
• Familiarity with product and delivery tools such as Jira, Confluence, Aha!, Mural, and Asana.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience delivering products or capabilities in Corporate Finance, FP&A, Expenditure Management, compensation, branch economics, or related finance domains.
• Experience operating in a regulated financial-services environment with risk, controls, compliance, and audit requirements.
• Strong customer advocacy and demonstrated ability to represent user needs in backlog prioritization and acceptance decisions.
• Ability to balance architecture, performance, scalability, security, and other non-functional requirements with business objectives.
Product Owner · Apolis