Digital Product Owner II

Location: Hybrid Work Model – Van Wert, Ohio or Dublin, Ohio

We are a team of employees who are passionate to deliver best in-class customer service and innovation in the industry. It’s because we put Integrity, Relationships and Excellence in all aspects of our work.

Our employees have the opportunity to fully utilize their talents and bring their best self.  We believe that who you are is just as important as what you do!

As a Digital Product Owner II – Commercial Lines, you’ll become a member of an empowered product team focused on our Commercial Lines Underwriting capabilities. Your responsibilities will involve collaborating with various stakeholders in services, Underwriting, and Insurance Product to gain insights into their future goals and priorities and translating that into your roadmap. Additionally, you will team up with other technology teams such as data analytics and rating to address interdependencies and coordinate releases effectively.

Working with your Engineering and Design counterparts, you’ll ensure we maximize our investment in product development by clearly articulating requirements, breaking down work, and orchestrating the product team's activities.  

How You Will Make an Impact

Market Discovery

• Research
  • User focused market research: Attend walkthroughs of Design and Product Manager.
  • Internal opportunities: Triage stakeholder requests to understand size and urgency.  Forward large non-urgent requests to Product Managers for evaluation, work with engineering to prioritize more urgent requests, and evaluate small requests to decide if they can be prioritized in the near-term.
  • Market research: Attend major walkthroughs of market research. 
  • Legal and regulatory: Understand legal and regulatory requirements, factor into stories & epics.

Strategic Planning

• Strategy
  • Market selection: Understand target markets.
  • Routes to market: Understand chosen routes to market.
  • Build, buy, partner:  Understand build, buy, partner plans.
  • Viability analysis: Help Product Managers understand delivery complexity.
  • Product strategy and prioritization: Understand the product roadmap and align delivery activities, including epics and stories to roadmap.  Surface misalignment to Product Manager.

Definition and Viability

• Planning
  • Roadmap and work breakdown: Work with Product Manager, Product Development, and Design to break initiatives into epics and stories.  Document stories with strong acceptance criteria and coordinate with Product Managers as they document epics. Work with Product Development, Design, and Product Manager to set realistic timelines for epic and story delivery.
  • Effort sizing: Facilitate the process to get t-shirt sizes for epics and stories.
  • Sprint planning: Create the initial list of stories and epics to be included within each sprint based on priority, effort, capacity, and dependencies and coordinate with Design and Product Development to finalize list.     
• Validation
  • Opportunity testing: Slot assumption tests into sprints and track dependencies.
  • Product Management walkthroughs: Walk through stories with business as needed to gain sign-off.
  • Design walkthroughs: Attend all Design Playbacks and adjust stories based on feedback.

Build and Deliver

• Handoff
  • Development commitment: Facilitate meetings to get Product Development to feel comfortable with work and commit to completion date. Answer questions about epics and stories.  Share content about initiatives as needed. Work with engineering to breakdown or aggregate stories as needed or change sequence based on dependencies and potential efficiencies.

• Tracking
  • Progress tracking: Facilitate regular standups and track release burndown at the story and epic level.  Flag delays, communicate as needed, and adjust timelines if needed. Escalate recurring issues. 
  • Enhancements and defects: Regularly review product backlog and triage requests to determine which requests are defects and which are enhancements.  Work with Product Development to prioritize defect remediation. Decide which enhancements need to be pushed to Product Manager for roadmap planning and prioritize small effort enhancements that have large impact in near-term roadmap.
  • Stakeholder management: Facilitate regular communications with stakeholders and remediate any disconnects.  Regularly share status with x-functional teams.
  • Vendor relationships: Track costs for each vendor.  Manage relationship, identify potential improvements and requests enhancements.
• Release
  • Release rollout and enablement: Work with Product Development and Design to conduct training sessions for department and agent trainers as needed.
  • Quality testing: Draft acceptance criteria and assist in running high-level functional end-to-end testing when other resources are unavailable.
  • User acceptance testing: Attend UAT sessions as needed. Gather output from testing to feed back into future epics and stories.
  • Compliance: Co-ordinate project releases with relevant internal audit, and security teams to ensure all compliance requirements are met.
• Go-to-market
  • Go-to-market targets: Understand GTM targets and create stories for instrumentation as needed.
  • Value prop messaging: Understand and be able to articulate the product value proposition.
  • Packaging: Understand insurance packaging plans and factor into stories and release planning.

Sense and Respond

• Coordination
  • X-functional coordination: Remain up to date on x-functional product and business team members and coordinate with team.
• Performance
  • Product outcomes: Identify UI and API driven events that help the team understand user experience and adoption and document tracking needs within user stories and epics.
  • Financial performance: Understand financial performance and product contribution.
  • Product cost tracking: Track high-level costs associated with products and report to stakeholders, product development, and Product Managers.
  • Quality performance: Track quality of release deliverables and prepares reports.

What You Will Bring

• Master’s degree in business management or computer related field and 2 years direct Product Owner experience
  • Or Bachelor’s degree in business management or computer related field and 4 years direct Product Owner experience
  • Or 6 years direct Product Owner experience
• Strong foresight to identify ill-defined requirements, capacity constraints, risks, and dependencies that may require resequencing or rewriting of epics and stories
• Concise communication skills to ensure Product Development teams understand requirements and acceptance criteria and status and performance are understood by technical and non-technical audiences
• Inquisitive with the ability to find bottlenecks, broken processes, capacity issues, and communication breakdowns and work with others to remediate
• Continuous improvement mindset with the ability to reflect on past team experiences and identify and execute future improvements
• Highly organized with the ability to create and track executable plans that maximize Product Development utilization and efficiency while also meeting user and market requirements
• Outcome oriented with the ability to track and communicate performance
• Collaborative with strong relationship building skills to coordinate x-functional teams
• Knowledgeable about different delivery methods and agile principals and methods