Product Owner

Job Title: Product Owner (Annuity Servicing Initiative)

Location: Golden Valley – Minnesota

Duration: 12 Months

Work Authorisation: USC and GC Only (C2H)

Pay Rate: $65-68/hr. on W2

Job Description:

Note: Looking for a candidate who is working in Minnesota based client currently.

Area: End to End – Annuity Servicing Initiative: Actuarial

Operations & Tax Core Capability, Agile Team Overview:

A Product Owner at **** helps define what work is important to be delivered and why. This is a cross-functional role that spans from technology capability to stakeholder alignment and storytelling. This tends to be a person that can understand complex problems and help translate those into a feasible solution on behalf of business.

Responsibilities

• Articulate and help identify the vision, benefits, and roadmap for the Annuity product capability.
• Collaborate with prospective users, and across multiple delivery teams to understand needs and translate them into product requirements, user stories, and sprint/iteration plans.
• Ensure the product backlog is transparent, visible and understood and stories are defined and prioritized
• Understands impacts and trade-offs related to dynamic and ever-changing priorities
• Oversee work throughout the entire development life cycle.
• Communicates with leadership and business at all levels on work progress, roadmap updates, and risks/issues
• Customer proxy responsible for working with the delivery team, Product Management, and other stakeholders - including other Product Owners

Team

The Operations & Tax Core Capability team objective is to support organizational growth on the platform. This includes optimizing operations to support the continuous launch of new products and the increasing volume of applications and transactions on the platform. This involves addressing and resolving foundational capability needs on the administrative system, reducing risk and driving operational efficiency in support of future growth.

Methodology: Agile / Scrum

Team Makeup: Product Manager, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Enterprise Architects, Developers across multiple capabilities, Quality Assurance, Business Analysts, Business Process Analysts, Product Calculation Analysts, and external vendor partners.

Stakeholders

The work of this team spans across multiple areas and requires coordination across Inforce delivery teams (product and business configuration, integrations, digital, print). Inforce is defined as everything occurring post-issue on an annuity contract: policy administrations, accounting, tax forms and feeds, and customer communications.

Critical Skills and Experience:

Qualifications:

• 3-5 years Product Owner Experience
• Strong soft skills, can communicate effectively at all levels
• Proactive
• Negotiation skills
• Stakeholder management
• Decision making
• Able to influence without authority
• Self-motivator / driver
• Self-organizer
• Maintains a solution focus, facilitating "here's how we can” versus "here's why we can't” mindset
• Experience with external vendors

Preferred:

• 5 years Product Owner Experience
• Strong leadership ability, with experience coaching other product owners
• Experience with the Agile framework (SAFe, Scrum, KanBan)
• Knowledge of Jira and/or Polarion (epics, user stories, tasks, subtasks)
• In-depth knowledge of the financial services industry, with specific long term care experience preferred