Product Owner

!!ONSITE 4 DAYS A WEEK!!

Job Description

OVERVIEW

Role Overview

The Product Owner / Project Lead sits at the center of delivery — the person who makes sure the right things get built, in the right order, to the right standard, and actually shipped. This is a dual-function role that combines the product thinking of a seasoned PO with the operational discipline of a strong project lead, and it requires someone who is equally comfortable writing user stories, running sprint ceremonies, managing a delivery timeline, and holding a frank conversation with a client stakeholder about scope.

You will own the end-to-end delivery lifecycle across AI and technology engagements: defining requirements with clarity, sequencing work with judgment, keeping delivery teams focused and unblocked, managing stakeholder expectations proactively, and ensuring that what ships is what was promised — on time, to quality, and with the documentation and handoff that makes it sustainable after you leave.

This role is ideal for someone who understands that the gap between a great design and a successful delivery is filled by people who take ownership of the details — who track what matters, communicate what is real, and treat every sprint as a commitment they personally stand behind.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Project-Specific Expectations

End-to-End Delivery Ownership

• Own the full delivery lifecycle of AI and technology engagements — from requirements definition and backlog creation through sprint execution, release management, and final client handoff — with accountability for delivery outcomes rather than process compliance.

• Maintain a clear, prioritized, well-groomed backlog at all times: stories that are specific enough to build, sequenced according to business value and technical dependencies, and understood by the entire delivery team before work begins.

• Run effective sprint ceremonies — planning, standup, review, and retrospective — that keep teams aligned, surface blockers early, and produce delivery momentum rather than just meeting attendance.

• Track delivery progress against commitments with honesty: maintaining accurate burn-down, identifying scope risk before it becomes a schedule problem, and communicating delivery status to stakeholders with the clarity and frequency they need to make decisions.

• Own the release process end to end: coordinating UAT, managing defect triage, tracking acceptance criteria completion, and ensuring that deployments happen in a controlled, documented, and reversible manner.

• Produce handoff documentation — user guides, runbooks, training materials, and knowledge transfer plans — that enable client teams to operate and evolve what was built without ongoing dependency on the consulting firm.

Product Ownership & Requirements

• Lead requirements discovery sessions with client stakeholders: extracting the real need beneath the stated request, identifying conflicting priorities across stakeholder groups, and translating business requirements into development-ready specifications that engineers can act on.

• Write user stories and acceptance criteria that are unambiguous, testable, and genuinely reflect the business outcome the stakeholder cares about — not feature descriptions padded with assumptions.

• Own the product vision for each engagement workstream: maintaining a clear understanding of what the system is supposed to do, how it fits into the client's broader operating environment, and what trade-offs are worth making to keep delivery moving.

• Make scoping decisions with the context and judgment to protect both delivery commitments and client value — knowing when to defer a feature, when to escalate a scope change, and when to push back on a request that undermines the integrity of what is being built.

• Validate that delivered functionality actually meets acceptance criteria before it reaches the client — because defects discovered in sprint review are a delivery problem, but defects discovered in client UAT are a credibility problem.

Stakeholder Management & Communication

• Manage client stakeholder relationships with proactive communication and professional candor that prevents surprises — keeping decision-makers informed, aligned, and equipped to make the calls that keep delivery moving.

• Facilitate stakeholder alignment sessions when priorities conflict, requirements are ambiguous, or scope is contested — driving toward clear decisions rather than deferring ambiguity into the backlog.

• Produce delivery status reports and executive updates that are accurate, concise, and decision-oriented: telling stakeholders what has been delivered, what is at risk, what decisions are needed, and what comes next.

• Manage scope change requests with discipline: evaluating the impact on timeline, budget, and technical architecture before agreeing to anything, and documenting every change with rigor that protects both the firm and the client from misaligned expectations.

• Build the kind of delivery credibility with client teams that makes them confident the engagement is in good hands — because the most important thing a project lead delivers is trust.

Team Enablement & Delivery Operations

• Keep the delivery team focused, unblocked, and operating at full capacity: removing impediments before they slow delivery, resolving dependency conflicts before they become blockers, and escalating resource or environment issues before they cost sprint days.

• Partner closely with technical leads and architects to ensure the delivery plan reflects engineering realities — not optimistic estimates made in isolation from the people doing the work.

• Maintain delivery hygiene across the engagement: up-to-date tickets, accurate sprint boards, clear definition of done, and a shared understanding of what "complete" means for every piece of work.

• Contribute to the firm’s delivery methodology: capturing what works, flagging what does not, and building reusable playbooks and templates that make future engagements more efficient and resilient.

REQUIREMENTS

Qualifications

Required

• 6 years of experience in product ownership, project management, or delivery leadership in a technology consulting or enterprise software environment — with a track record of owning delivery end-to-end across complex, multi-workstream engagements.

• Demonstrated mastery of agile delivery: able to run effective sprint ceremonies, manage a well-groomed backlog, track delivery metrics with honesty, and distinguish ceremony compliance from genuine delivery agility.

• Proven ability to write requirements that engineers can build from without asking for clarification — user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional specifications that eliminate ambiguity rather than encoding it.

• Strong stakeholder management skills: able to facilitate alignment across competing interests, manage scope changes with discipline, and deliver difficult messages to senior stakeholders with clarity and professional composure.

• Sufficient technical literacy to have credible conversations with software engineers, data architects, and AI practitioners — not to code alongside them, but to understand what they are building, identify when estimates are unrealistic, and ask the right questions when something does not add up.

• Experience managing delivery risk: tracking dependencies, identifying schedule threats early, and maintaining accurate delivery forecasts under changing requirements and real-world constraints.

• Excellent written communication: able to produce status reports, decision briefs, and handoff documentation that are clear, concise, and actionable.

Preferred

• Experience delivering AI, data, or analytics platform engagements — with an understanding of the unique delivery challenges posed by machine learning systems, data dependencies, and iterative model development cycles.

• Background in one or more core verticals: AgTech, Logistics, Financial Services, or Construction — with the domain fluency to write requirements that reflect how the business actually operates.

• Familiarity with modern delivery tooling: Jira, Linear, Notion, Confluence or equivalent platforms for backlog management, documentation, and delivery tracking.

• Experience with change management and organizational adoption: helping client teams understand, embrace, and sustain the systems and processes introduced by an engagement.

• Professional certifications (e.g., Certified Scrum Product Owner, PMI-ACP, PMP, SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager).

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