Product Owner - Agile

The next part of your journey is right around the corner — with The Standard.

A genuine desire to make a difference in the lives of others is the foundation for everything we do. With a customer-first mindset and an intentional focus on building strong teams, we’ve been able to uphold our legacy of financial stability while investing in new, innovative technologies that support the needs of our customers. Our high-performance culture focused on operational excellence thrives thanks to remarkable people united by compassion and a customer-first commitment. Are you ready to make a difference?

Functional Job Summary:

At the Standard, Agile Product Owner job family is a discipline focused on the execution of product strategy and vision.  The Product Owner family defines and prioritizes product features, aligns business goals with customer needs, and collaborates with cross-functional teams to deliver high-value solutions in an Agile environment.  They advocate for the end user, monitor key performance metrics, and drive collaboration across teams to deliver high-quality, timely solutions. Product Owners balance strategic thinking with tactical execution, leveraging data and feedback to continuously improve the product and ensure project success.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities:

The Product Owner is a member of the Agile Team responsible for defining Stories and prioritizing the team backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the features for the team.  The Product Owner has a significant role in incremental value delivery and collaborates with the team to ensure that the story meets the definition of done.

20%     Strategy & Planning

• Develops a deep understanding of the customer, their needs and is a champion for the voice of the customer.
• Contributes to 12-18 month product roadmap and assists in prioritization of business features.

80%     Execution & Delivery

• Collaborates with Product Manager on feature creation and Program Backlog prioritization.
• Drives the decomposition of features into story maps and incremental value delivery.

• Responsible for the preparation and participation in PI Planning.
• Executes against the product roadmap and PI Priorities.
• Accountable for the health and readiness of the team backlog, including new features, defects and technical debt.
• Manages and prioritizes the flow of work to ensure consistency of incremental value delivery.
• Develops detailed user stories containing thorough and testable acceptance criteria, along with non-functional requirements.
• Understands enabler work and collaborates with product analysts and engineers to define and prioritize effectively in the backlog.
• Integrates user feedback and usability studies/research, to enhance user satisfaction.
• Collaborates with Product Manager to analyze metrics and analytics to make data informed decisions.
• Keeps pulse on the customers, anticipates bottlenecks, makes tradeoffs, and takes acceptable risks to maximize the benefit for our customer and business.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Strong communication skills including active listening and effective presentation of ideas.
• Must excel working in team-oriented roles that rely on ability to collaborate with others.
• Curiosity – ensures that user stories drive the associated value to the customer.
• Exhibits bias-to-action and avoids analysis-paralysis.
• Separates what must be done now, and what can be improved later.
• Willing to take informed risks.
• Knowledge & Skills:  Must exhibit strong consumer instincts, intuitively understands why product ideas will succeed, excellent written and verbal communication skills, with an ability to communicate with a wide range of cross-functional team members and business owners, experience with hypothesis-driven learning and turning data into actionable insights.
• Job Complexity & Judgment:  The Product Owner is the member of the Agile team who serves as the customer proxy.  Collaborates with Product Management on requirements and business priorities, is responsible for communicating the priorities, customer needs and business impact of value delivery to the agile team.
• Independence & Supervision required:  Ability to operate autonomously by delivering independently with limited guidance. Interaction & Influence:  The Product Owner has significant relationships and responsibilities outside the local team, including working with product management, customers and business owners and other stakeholders including other Product Owners.

Job Specifications:

Required education: Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Information Technology or a related field.  

Required experience: 2 years in a Product Owner role working within an Agile environment in addition to progressive experience in providing business analysis in employee benefits, financial services, technology delivery, or other related fields.

Required professional licensure or certification: NA 

Location:

Employees in this role are eligible for fully remote work (other than periodic in-person meetings or other periodic business travel).

Travel Requirements:

Occasional travel only (such as for planning purposes, team-building, or conferences) may be required.

Physical Requirements: N/A

We have built an enduring legacy of stability, financial strength and exceptional customer service through the contributions of the service-oriented people who choose to work at The Standard. To ensure we can attract and retain the best talent, when you join The Standard you can expect:

• A rich benefits package including medical, dental, vision and a 401(k) plan with matching company contributions

• An annual incentive bonus plan

• Generous paid time off including 11 holidays, 2 wellness days, and 8 volunteer hours annually — PTO increases with tenure

• A supportive, responsive management approach and opportunities for career growth and advancement 

• Paid parental leave and adoption/surrogacy assistance

• An employee giving program that double matches your donations to eligible nonprofits and schools

In addition to the competitive salary range below, our employee-focused benefits support work-life balance. Learn more about working at The Standard.

• Eligibility to participate in an incentive program is subject to the rules governing the program and plan. Any award depends on a variety of factors including individual and organizational performance.

The actual compensation for this role will be based on a combination of education and experience, knowledge and skills, position budget, internal equity, and market data.

Salary Range:

Standard Insurance Company, The Standard Life Insurance Company of New York, Standard Retirement Services, Inc., StanCorp Mortgage Investors, LLC, StanCorp Investment Advisers, Inc., and American Heritage Life Insurance Company and American Heritage Service Company, marketed as The Standard, are Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employers. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or veteran status or any other condition protected by federal, state or local law. Except where precluded by state or federal law, The Standard will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. The Standard offers a drug- and alcohol-free work environment where possession, manufacture, transfer, offer, use of or being impaired by an illegal substance while on The Standard's property, or in other cases which the company believes might affect operations, safety or reputation of the company is prohibited. The Standard requires a criminal background investigation and employment, education and licensing verification as a condition of employment. After any conditional offer of employment is made, the background check will include an individualized assessment based on the applicant’s specific record and the duties and requirements of the specific job. Applicants will be provided an opportunity to explain and correct background information. All employees of The Standard must be bondable.