Product Owner

Job Title: Product Owner- Technical Business Analyst

Location: Columbus, OH 43215

Duration: 6 Months- Contract to hire

Pay rate: $71 to 75/Hr on W2

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Business Analyst who will operate with a Product Owner mindset, acting as a critical decision-maker in how work is evaluated, prioritized, and delivered while also driving key activities associated with migrating from a custom in-house platform to a cloud-based SaaS environment.

This is not a traditional Business Analyst role.

This position is designed for someone who can challenge assumptions, lead platform transformation efforts, and accelerate delivery outcomes not just document requirements.

Minimum Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Business, IT, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)

7 years of experience in Business Analysis, Product Ownership, or related roles in a technology-driven environment

Experience working in Agile environments (Scrum, Kanban, etc.)

What Sets You Apart

Experience acting in a Product Owner capacity

Experience or supporting large-scale platform transformations

Background in retail energy, utilities, or complex B2B platforms (nice to have but not required)

Demonstrated success in driving platform improvements and cross-functional initiatives

Experience improving delivery performance, reducing cycle time, or increasing throughput

How This Role Is Different

This role is for someone who:

Doesn’t just gather requirements — they shape what gets built

Doesn’t accept requests at face value — they evaluate and challenge them

Doesn’t wait for direction — they drive transformation and execution

Bottom Line

You will be expected to:

Act like a Product Owner

Drive outcomes, not just outputs

Job Profile Summary

As a Senior Business Analyst (Product Owner Focus), you will serve as a central authority in the intake, evaluation, and prioritization of enhancement requests (Rapid requests) and a key influencer in coordinating production support (PSRs) across all business units.

In parallel, you will play a critical role in driving the critical project workstreams, coordinating cross-functional efforts such as business process automation, data cleanup, process alignment, system readiness, and migration planning.

You will act as an escalation point for Business Stakeholders, providing guidance on feasibility, complexity, and business value ensuring that only well-defined, high-impact work enters the development lifecycle.

This role is also accountable for ensuring that we maintain a continuous improvement mindset by ensuring the work that enters the development pipeline is optimized for delivery performance, which in turn, improves team velocity, and ensures effective execution within our outsourced development model, while taking ownership of any assigned project-level coordination responsibilities tied to our transformation efforts.

What You’ll Be Doing

Product Ownership & Intake Leadership

Act as a Product Owner in function, owning the evaluation and prioritization of incoming Rapid requests.

Serve as the primary escalation point for Business Stakeholders, providing direction on feasibility, scope clarity, and business value.

Lead Rapid review processes for various business departments, ensuring requests are actionable, properly scoped, and aligned to strategic priorities.

Make informed decisions on what should and should not enter the development pipeline.

Feasibility & Value Governance

Evaluate enhancement requests for technical feasibility, platform impact, and business value.

Determine when investigative development (Spikes) are warranted — ensuring they are used selectively and drive meaningful outcomes.

Challenge unclear, low-value, or redundant requests and guide stakeholders toward higher-impact solutions.

Domain Knowledge

Partner with the PMO, business and technical teams to align processes, workflows, and system capabilities with the target state models.

Identify risks, dependencies, and gaps in project readiness and ensure those risks are labeled & addressed with the PMO and Business Stakeholders.

Act as a PMO liaison working across stakeholders to ensure execution momentum and alignment throughout.

Delivery Lifecycle

Drive defined consistent improvement effort in the development lifecycle, with a focus on increasing velocity, throughput, and delivery predictability.

Partner with development teams and our development partners to ensure work is ready, prioritized, and efficiently executed.

Identify and eliminate inefficiencies in backlog management, handoffs, and execution.

Platform & Systems

Develop a deep understanding of the end-to-end Retail Energy Platform, including cross-functional dependencies.

Provide input into system design decisions, data structures, and integration considerations to support both current operations and future state system design.

Cross-Functional Execution

Drive alignment across Business, Technology, QA, Operations, and our external development partners.

Facilitate decision-making sessions across stakeholders with competing priorities.

Take ownership of driving initiatives forward, not just defining them.

Proactively identify risks, gaps, and opportunities — and work with our PMO team to ensure we address them.

What You Bring to the Table

Product Ownership Mindset

Proven ability to prioritize work based on business value and platform impact, not just stakeholder requests.

Experience acting as a decision-maker in backlog management and intake processes.

Strong judgment in balancing speed, quality, and long-term platform health.

Platform & Transformation Experience

Experience working on or supporting large-scale system transformations or migrations (SaaS, cloud, or platform modernization).

Strong understanding of data dependencies, data quality challenges, and migration considerations.

Ability to understand high level current-state operations and connect that to future-state systems design thinking.

Delivery & Execution Focus

Track record of working across teams to implement defined process improvement initiatives to improve team velocity, delivery timelines, or operational efficiency.

Strong understanding of Agile delivery models and how to optimize them in practice.

Experience working with outsourced or distributed development teams.

Influence

Ability to challenge stakeholders constructively and drive better outcomes.

Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences.

Proven ability to lead without authority and influence decisions across teams.