Director, Data Enablement Product Owner

Daybright Financial is a leading provider of benefits and retirement plan solutions, committed to delivering exceptional service and innovative products to our clients. We foster a collaborative, inclusive culture where employees are empowered to drive change and make a meaningful impact.

Daybright Financial is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance, 401(k) with company match, paid time off, and professional development opportunities.

This role ensures alignment with Daybright’s mission to simplify health and financial wellness, while driving growth, profitability, client retention, and cultural cohesion across legacy firms and newly acquired entities. This position must deliver on Daybright’s core values: People-Centered, Client-Focused, Work As One, Impact Communities, and Speak Up.

This position has hybrid/remote flexibility with varying onsite collaboration days.

We are seeking an Agile Product Owner to lead the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of our data enablement and data warehouse services supporting retirement and benefits lines of business. This leader will translate business outcomes into a clear backlog, orchestrate value delivery with cross‑functional business, technology and other support teams, and ensure our data products (pipelines, models, semantic layers, dashboards, and APIs) are trusted, usable, and adopted across Daybright Financial.

Core Responsibilities

• Product Vision & Roadmap: Define and communicate the vision for data enablement, aligning to business outcomes (time‑to‑insight, operational efficiency, advisor/client experience, compliance reporting). Maintain a transparent, prioritized roadmap that balances build and run work.
• Backlog Management: Author well‑formed user stories with business value, acceptance criteria, and testable outcomes. Continuously refine and prioritize the backlog across data acquisition, consolidation, conformed dimensional models, data quality & governance, semantic models, and BI consumption.
• Value Delivery via Agile Practices: Lead Scrum meetings (story mapping, backlog refinement, sprint planning, reviews/demos, retrospectives). Use flow metrics (cycle/lead time, throughput, WIP limits) to improve predictability and throughput.
• Stakeholder Engagement & Influence: Engage and influence varied stakeholders —business segment leaders, plan operations, advisor services, client service, finance, compliance/risk, marketing, and external partners—driving clarity on outcomes, priorities, and trade‑offs. Facilitate decisions, manage dependencies, and navigate differing perspectives.
• Data Product Excellence: Champion product thinking for data—define SLAs/SLOs for data freshness and quality, steward critical data elements, and ensure metadata, lineage, and governance enable trust and re‑use.
• Data Governance: Lead and scale a data governance framework from early-stage maturity to integration into key business and technical operations with a focus on core datapoints and processes critical to data enablement goals.
• Delivery & Support Partnership: Work daily with business and technology teams, balancing feature delivery with production stability, incident triage, defect remediation, and technical debt reduction.
• Compliance & Risk Alignment: Understand cybersecurity, risk and compliance requirements to embed privacy, retention, and access controls; ensure data products meet regulatory expectations if needed (e.g., SEC/FINRA where applicable).
• Adoption & Change Management: Drive measurable adoption of data products—enable training, documentation, and self‑service patterns; collect feedback; iterate based on usage analytics and stakeholder NPS/CSAT.

Required Agile Behaviors & Knowledge

• Scrum mastery from the Product Owner seat: backlog ownership, value slicing, release planning, and empirical inspection/adaptation through sprint reviews and retrospectives.
• Kanban for flow‑based work: visualize work, set WIP limits, manage flow, and optimize lead time for requests, enhancements, and support tickets.
• Discovery & Delivery: stakeholder interviews, hypothesis framing, thin slices/experiments, A/B or cohort analysis; pair with teams on Behavior Driven Development/Acceptance Testing Driven Development and acceptance tests.
• Metrics‑driven: use outcome and flow metrics (OKRs, adoption/utilization, data quality scores, cycle time, predictability) to guide decisions.

Leadership & Influence

• Servant leadership that elevates teams while holding clear accountability for outcomes.
• Effective facilitation across senior leaders, business SMEs, and technical teams; able to frame options, quantify impact, and secure decisions.
• Conflict resolution & negotiation across competing needs; comfortable saying “no” (or “not now”) with rationale grounded in value.
• Change agent who models continuous improvement and coaches teams in agile/product practices, aiding Daybright’s Agile evolution journey.

Experience & Qualifications

Must‑have

• 8 years in Product Ownership, Product Management, Business Analysis, or adjacent roles delivering data/analytics products or platforms.
• Hands‑on experience running Scrum/Kanban with both delivery and support teams (feature development, production operations, incident/problem management).
• Strong data enablement background: data consolidation from multiple sources (including post‑merger/acquisition), dimensional modeling, conformed dimensions, ETL/ELT, data quality rules, and governance (metadata, lineage).
• Demonstrated success engaging diverse stakeholders and client/user personas within financial services, translating business needs into data products that are adopted and measurably valuable.

Nice‑to‑have / Preferred

• Familiarity with retirement planning (e.g., DC/DB recordkeeping, plan administration), benefits, and/or financial advisory operations (CRM, pipeline, service workflows).
• Experience with modern data stacks (e.g., Microsoft Fabric / Azure Synapse / Dataverse), orchestration tools, and Power BI.
• Certifications: CSPO/PSPO, SAFe POPM, ScrumMaster (CSM/PSM)

Key Performance Indicators

• Business outcomes: reduced time‑to‑insight, improved leadership insights and employee/client experience, decreased manual reconciliation.
• Adoption & satisfaction: active users, product utilization, stakeholder NPS/CSAT.
• Flow & quality: sprint/flow predictability, cycle time, escaped defect rate, data quality scores.
• Operational health: SLA/SLO adherence for data freshness and platform stability.