Surety Product Owner

Title: Surety Product Owner

Work site: Mississauga - Hybrid

Duration: Contract

Job Description

In this role, you will work with Global Surety business stakeholders, Product Leaders, Business Analysts, and Agile engineering teams to support delivery of business capabilities across the Surety platform.

You will help translate business needs into well-defined features and user stories, maintain and prioritize the product backlog, participate in PI and sprint planning, and support engineering and QA teams throughout delivery.

The ideal candidate will have working knowledge of the Surety domain, strong business analysis and Product Owner skills, and the ability to collaborate effectively with both business and technology teams.

Key Responsibilities

1. Surety Business Domain Support

• Work with Underwriting, Operations, Billing, and Product stakeholders to understand business requirements and priorities.
• Apply working knowledge of the Surety bond lifecycle, including new business, changes/riders, renewals, cancellations, reinstatements, and related transactions.
• Support requirements across Contract and Commercial Surety products.
• Collaborate with business SMEs on more complex Surety scenarios such as co-surety, international guarantees, and regional variations.
• Document business rules, process flows, data requirements, and acceptance criteria.

2. Product Backlog & Agile Delivery

• Support backlog refinement and help translate business requirements into Features and User Stories.
• Write clear user stories with appropriate acceptance criteria.
• Participate in PI Planning, sprint planning, sprint reviews, demos, and backlog refinement.
• Work closely with Product Leadership to prioritize backlog items based on business value, dependencies, and delivery needs.
• Provide day-to-day functional clarification to developers and QA engineers.
• Track dependencies and coordinate with other Product Owners and delivery teams when required.

3. Systems Integration

• Develop an understanding of the application ecosystem and how information flows between user interfaces, APIs, core Surety platforms, billing, and downstream systems.
• Work with architects and engineers to clarify functional requirements for APIs and system integrations.
• Support validation of rating, premium calculations, billing currency, and other financial business rules.
• Partner with QA and business users during integration testing, bug resolution, and UAT.

Required Qualifications & Experience

Surety / Insurance Domain

• 2 years of experience in Surety, Commercial Insurance, Specialty Insurance, or a related business domain.
• Working knowledge of the Surety bond lifecycle and common bond types is preferred.
• Exposure to areas such as rating, billing, co-surety, guarantees, or financial transactions is advantageous but not required to be expert-level.

Product Ownership / Business Analysis

• 2 years of experience as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, Product Analyst, or similar role in an Agile environment.
• Experience translating business requirements into Features, User Stories, and Acceptance Criteria.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum; exposure to SAFe or PI Planning is beneficial.
• Experience with Jira and Confluence or similar Agile delivery tools.

Technical Aptitude

• General understanding of APIs, data flows, JSON, and system integrations.
• Ability to work effectively with developers, QA engineers, architects, and business stakeholders.
• Ability to learn business and technical concepts without being expected to act as the technical architect.

Stakeholder Communication Skills

• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to collaborate across Business, Product, Engineering, and QA teams.
• Comfort asking questions, clarifying requirements, and facilitating discussions.
• Ability to organize competing priorities and work effectively in a multi-team environment.