Product Owner II

Job Description

Job Description

Job Title: Product Owner II 

Location: Buffalo, NY

Hire Type: Contingent

Pay Range: $64.50/hour

Work Type: Full-Time 

Work Model: Onsite 

Work Schedule: Monday - Friday, 8am – 5pm 

Recruiter Contact: Samantha Marranca | [email protected] 

Nature & Scope:

Positional Overview

The Imagine Group is recruiting for a Product Owner II on behalf of our client, a leading financial institution in Buffalo, New York, serving individuals, businesses, and communities across the eastern United States. Known for its strong regional presence, commitment to community engagement, and focus on long-term customer relationships, the organization offers a stable and collaborative work environment with opportunities for growth.

In this role, you will be responsible for serving as owner of a large product or set of products by representing the voice of the customer and stakeholders to ensure that the product provides value to the customer, while aligning with the business strategy. Product Owner II defines their product vision and roadmap, prioritizes the product backlog, anticipates client needs and serves as primary communicator between product stakeholders and teams while evaluating product progress at each iteration. In addition, the Product Owner II plays a key role in the company's strategic direction, defining and articulating new opportunities, and working in close concert with key stakeholders, including senior leadership and their dedicated agile team.

Role & Responsibility:

Tasks That Will Lead to Your Success: 

• Build and own the large product or set of products vision and roadmap that aligns with the overall strategic intent and communicate them with the team and all stakeholders. Prioritize the backlog(s) based on the overall product vision and strategy.
• Supporting major digital banking initiative and building new online and mobile banking experience for business and wealth banking customers. 
• Experience with defect management/reporting and CMS implementation.
• Represent the voice of the customer within the team and convey story details to the team; make autonomous decisions, quickly and thoughtfully, to move delivery forward in alignment with overall product vision and strategy.
• Write user stories and groom the backlog in partnership with the team. Specify acceptance criteria for each user story in support of moving the team to Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD).
• Work directly with the delivery team to create appropriate information radiators and other communication tools for internal team and stakeholder use to show progress on a large product or multiple products.
• Participate in all team activities and ceremonies.
• Use a matrixed influencing approach to working with essential business partners throughout the organization, often at a more senior level and irrespective of hierarchy or divisions, advocating for the benefit of the customer.
• Understand and engage with your customers.
• Focus on outcomes over outputs, incorporating design thinking methods and analytics to inform product design. Due to the scope of these product(s), these efforts are often more complex.
• Collaborate across teams and with other Product Owners to align the customer journey and dependent backlogs.
• May act on behalf of the Senior Product Owner as required by absence.
• Understand and adhere to the Company's risk and regulatory standards, policies and controls in accordance with the Company's Risk Appetite. 
• Identify risk-related issues needing escalation to management.
• Promote an environment that supports diversity and reflects the brand.
• Maintain internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit points together with any issues raised by external regulators as applicable.
• Complete other related duties as assigned.
• Build strong and working relationships with both Stakeholders and Vendor Management.
• Clearly communicate the product vision, business outcomes and priorities within the program.
• Leading engineering team to drive requirements, milestones, dependencies, deliverables to completion

Skills & Experience

Qualifications That Will Help You Thrive

• Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 6 years business, analytical, technical and/or product experience, or in lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 10 years higher education and/or work experience, including a minimum of 6 years business, analytical, technical and/or product experience. 
• User Acceptance Testing (UAT) experience
• Defect Management & Reporting experience 
• Content Management System (CMS) Implementation 
• Highly plug-and-play and contribute quickly due to the project timeline and current volume of functionality and moving from development/SIT into UAT.