Sr Product Owner

Date: Dec 12, 2024

Location: Washington, DC, US, 20036 (or Columbus, OH, US, 43202)

Company: American Chemical Society

Position Title: Sr Product Owner

The American Chemical Society is the world's largest scientific membership association and one of the top ten science publishers in the world. The Platform Products team within ACS oversees the creation, maturation, and maintenance of internal platforms that support ACS Publications' core business (ACS Journals) with a focus on maximizing the customer experience.

Position Summary:

The responsibility of a Sr. Product Owner is to understand the business processes, clearly document, develop use cases, facilitate backlog refinement meetings, write user stories, clarify business needs to the technical team, acceptance test, showcase the developed products to leadership and contribute to the overall product development for portfolio level products enhancing user experience. He/she uses proven critical skills such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills to add value to the overall product development. This position requires the ability to work independently and take initiative while working effectively as an active team member of the product team.

Responsibilities:

• Primarily responsible for maximizing the value delivered by the team by ensuring that the team backlog is aligned with customer and stakeholder needs.
• Serves as a subject matter expert (SME), super-user and an evangelist for the product.
• Works in close partnership with the Product Manager to ensure that the product strategy and the implementation remain connected throughout the value stream.
• Contributes to Program Increment planning and responsible for conducting agile ceremonies to keep the product team on track towards deliverables.
• Assists with Product backlog prioritization process in collaboration with the Product Manager, System Architects, and other stakeholders.
• Play a critical role in enabling the continuous feedback loops that fuels the value stream.
• Understands the underlying Business processes and contributes to the product vision and roadmap with the mindset of the customer.
• Understand the current technical capabilities and limitations and recommend innovative approaches to reduce the overhead of developing new features and maintaining existing features.
• Understand relationships between applications within the backend systems and able to define the dependencies for the product.
• Checks out the features delivered are at the expected quality before they are available for the customer.
• Produce comprehensive business and technical documentation relevant to completed products.
• Share or showcase progress made by the product team and value delivered to appropriate audiences.
• Overseeing all stages of product creation including design and development.

Education/Experience/Technological Knowledge

• Bachelor's Degree required (preferred in IT/Computer Science/ Business).
• 10+ years of experience as a Product Owner or Business Analyst with a product mindset.
• Strong analytical and quantitative problem-solving skills with sharp business value judgment.
• In-depth knowledge of most common Software Development methodologies such as Agile, Kanban/Scrum, Waterfall.
• Ability to adapt and willingness to learn.
• Demonstrated ability to work both independently and as part of a team, can balance competing priorities, manage multiple concurrent projects, identify problems, and anticipate needs, create and maintain documentation for processes.
• Must have excellent verbal and written communication skills including excellent client relationship skill sets with the ability to communicate analytical terms in non-analytical business language.
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize quickly and effectively both in individual work and in the assessment of business requirements/user stories.
• The ability to influence and drive cross functional teams.
• A working knowledge of the agile software development process.
• Familiarity with the capabilities and uses of the following technologies: prototyping, wireframes, Java ( or any similar programming language), SQL is desired.
• SAFe Agile Product Owner certification or similar is preferred.

This position is based in the Washington, DC or Columbus, OH offices of the American Chemical Society. A reasonable rate of compensation per year is listed for each location.

• DC: between $140,000 to 175,000
• OH: between $126,000 to $165,000

Employees work a hybrid schedule as decided by functional area. The balance of the week is open to working remotely, though employees are always welcome onsite each day if they choose. Some travel may be required.

ACS currently provides the following benefits for this position: paid vacation leave, paid sick leave, paid holidays, health insurance, flexible spending account or health care savings account, dental insurance, life insurance, vision insurance, retirement benefits, short- and long-term disability, and 4-week work from anywhere; each benefit is subject to the terms of the applicable program. Additional benefits may apply based on skills, experience, and location.

Any actual offer of employment, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be made in the sole discretion of ACS. ACS reserves the right to amend or modify its employment benefits and compensation structure at any time.

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