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Product Owner (12-month contract opportunity)

Employer
Northwest Evaluation Association
Location
Portland, OR, US
Salary
Competitive
Description
Product Owner (12-Month Contract Opportunity)

About This Role...

Individuals in this role provide the following services to the organization: 1) leadership and driving of successful product delivery; 2) leadership and advocacy of agile Scrum and Kanban teams; 3) continuous improvement of processes for the Product Development department; and 3) development and maintenance of tools, techniques, and standards pertaining to the project life cycle.

Responsibilities ...

  • Fulfill the role of a Product Owner within the Scaled Agile Framework on all sizes of initiatives.
  • Support NWEA's commitment to implementing and establishing policies and procedures that are grounded in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility best practices. Make diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) practices the backbone of our work.
  • Collaborate with Product Management and other department stakeholders on exploration and planning of program initiatives.
  • Lead and facilitate the work of agile teams from Design to Release by working with stakeholders to clarify epic success criteria, design feature solutions, and build and release features that bring business value.
  • Accountable for Design activities including user research, information architecture, user testing, and feature mapping.
  • Advocate for and facilitate Human Centered Design and lean-agile methodologies in all initiatives; act as a catalyst for creative problem solving and a champion for reducing waste.
  • Accountable for code builds, releases, and validation of released code within your domain.
  • Create Program Increment, Sprint, and Release plans; ensure that plans receive appropriate review, authorization, and visibility through agile ceremonies.
  • Ownership and strong stewardship of agile team backlog, story definitions and refinement; including rank order across competing priorities (roadmap, maintenance, defects, etc.)
  • Be an advocate and voice across the enterprise for agile development team.
  • Be the voice of the customer (partner) within the agile team.
  • Assist team in evaluating and establishing their capacity to inform project plans.
  • Track project/team interdependencies and coordinate efforts across disparate teams with other Product Owners or stakeholders.
  • Timely approval of stories to ensure quality control at the team level and to ensure technical and functional integrity of our products.
  • Track and forecast project progress, activity, and effort; communicate effectively through multiple channels to sponsors and key stakeholders; manage external delivery partners where required.
  • Continuous and early assessment of project risk factors and recommendation of courses of action to mitigate risk.
  • Lead and participate in developing, maintaining, and evolving standards, tools, templates and documented processes for process improvement and project governance.

Skills and A bilities ...

  • Strong experience in Scrum and/or Kanban processes and protocols, a must; proven foundational knowledge of standard project management best practices, a must.
  • Experience with the Scaled Agile Framework is desired.
  • Strong leadership skills with proven ability to successfully manage and facilitate functional and/or cross-functional teams; ability to build strong working relationships and work effectively with all levels of an organization from entry level to executive.
  • Exceptional communication skills: proven ability to transform complexities into clear, concise written communications, ability to listen and absorb details and strategic vision, convey respect and inclusion for colleagues and partners.
  • Ability to distinguish milestones and measures critical to project success and translate these into meaningful management information.
  • Ability to balance competing demands for project scope, time, cost, risk and quality; combined with ability to manage several projects concurrently with a sense for organizational priority.
  • Ability to remain cool under pressure and demonstrate competence when challenged.
  • Experience in successfully and logically negotiating with stakeholders.
  • Ability to facilitate and control meetings and discussions where disparate points of views need to be voiced and acknowledged.
  • Innate ability to continuously identify and implement improvements to process, protocol or policy.
  • Ability to track details and also strategize for product vision and plan several steps ahead.
  • Proficiency in a broad range of agile project management and roadmap tools such as Jira, Confluence, Target Process, Trello, Miro.

Competencies ...

  • Instill trust: gain the confidence and trust of others through honesty, integrity, and authenticity
  • Communicate effectively: develop and deliver multi-mode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences
  • Customer focus: build strong customer relationships and deliver customer-centric solutions
  • Drive results: consistently achieve results, even under tough circumstances

Education and E xperience ...

  • Bachelor's degree in Business, Engineering, or similar discipline required; MBA or other advanced degree or equivalent work experience preferred.
  • Minimum five years of practical delivery experience in the area of product ownership, project management, Scrum Master and/or business analysis with demonstrated results.
  • Minimum 2 years leading agile teams.
  • Strong preference for experience in the technology industry.
  • Extensive project management process experience including project portfolio prioritization, estimating, project planning, scheduling, risk and issue management.
  • Experience in vendor relations and contract negotiations for program/project outsourced services and products, preferred.
  • Scrum Certification in Product Ownership desired; experience with creation of project portfolio management tools and design of dynamic, data-driven web applications highly desirable.

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