The work we do has an impact on millions of lives, and you can be a part of it.
We help protect our customers against life’s uncertainties. Regardless of where you work within the company, you’ll be helping provide protection and peace of mind when our customers need it most.
The Product Owner (PO) serves as a member of the APD Project Management Team(s) and is responsible for many facets of the teams’ workload including collaboration, intake, business value and prioritization. The PO is accountable for working with business stakeholders to define acceptance criteria and ensuring the criteria is met once the story is completed. The PO works closely with leadership and the Project Management team to maximize the value of the work being performed in any given sprint.
The Product Owner function understands and represents the “voice of the customer” internally by communicating and working closely with technology teams to help create solution documents, sizing efforts and prioritization of projects on the roadmap. The PO serves as a single point of contact with internal and external resources, collaborating across multiple functional areas to enhance distributor and customer experience and to ensure operational alignment, scale and readiness for distribution.
Value Delivery in each Sprint
- Drive to completion 1-2 features during any one quarter
- Interact with customers and stakeholders to elaborate and understand needs to user stories under features assigned.
- Respond to teams’ questions about requirements or assist in the facilitation of requirement feedback.
- Clarify user stories, product vision and specification.
- Collaborate with teams daily to ensure the goals of the sprint are met.
- Evaluate completed user stories to ensure the acceptance criteria is met prior to delivering to business stakeholders.
Testing
- Serve as point of contact for testing requests for development team.
- Work to anticipate testing needs during a given sprint.
- Coordinate testing completion based on priority and team capacity.
- Assist in quarterly planning activities, support assigned development team in preparing for and engaging in quarterly planning and facilitate communication and tracking of assigned features.
- Assist team with presentation of value delivered in sprint. Anticipate appropriate level of detail needed and likely questions.
Influence/Leadership
- Provide leadership by modeling excellence in high productivity, strong work ethic, and positive interaction with others.
- Represent the team in interdepartmental projects and corporate initiatives; consult with the business area on the most complex system-related issues and make recommendations for better utilizing the available technology.
Reporting
- Maintain detailed knowledge and communicate the status of specific features assigned that affect business partner groups.
- At regular intervals, meet with business partners, discuss status updates, gather information on upcoming initiatives and relative priorities of each.
Relationship Management
- Develop and maintain strong relationships with business units and team members to understand and identify tactical business needs and optimized solutions based on MVP.
- Interact with clients to mitigate risks and to resolve problems.
- Provide transparency to business partners on scope, schedule, and resource constraints to a plan.
Work Experience, Education, Certification / Training Required
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience required. Master’s degree, PMP, CSPO, and P certifications preferred.
- Demonstrated professional level abilities in process management, effective tool usage, evangelizing product technologies and related application capabilities.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly, negotiate, listen, mitigate conflict, build alliances, and achieve results.
- Minimum 2+ years demonstrated experience in project management or support roles in customer facing environments requiring complex relationship management.
- Minimum 2+ years working with integrated project teams using varied delivery methodologies.
- Certifications in industry-related or discipline-related organizations are desirable and may substitute some work and/or technical experience. (Organization could include Scrum Alliance, LOMA, SILA, American College, PMI, IIBA, IIST)
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities Required
- Ability to build relationships and establish credibility quickly with key stakeholders internally and externally.
- Sound understanding of software development life cycle and successful management of multiple full lifecycle projects required, Agile experience is highly preferred.
- Meaningful experience and expertise working with front and back-office processes and technologies, integrating business and technology, and managing demand and prioritization required.
- Experience/in-depth knowledge of business requirements analysis.
- Leadership and negotiation skills, with driving desire and high propensity to learn quickly and develop oneself.
- Ability to communicate clearly, negotiate, listen, mitigate conflict, build alliances, and achieve desired results using strong interpersonal and diplomacy skills.
- Ability to work independently, with minimal management direction, and within a team environment.
- Skilled at asking questions and professionally challenging to uncover key facts and information.
- Has the courage to make decisions but also has the wisdom to know when a decision requires escalation.
- Builds consensus among diverse groups of stakeholders; highly skilled at facilitating resolution across functions and departments.
- Has the confidence to engage and work productively with business leaders.
- Dedicated team orientation and willingness to work to earn trust of the team.
- Other related skills and/or abilities may also be required to perform this job.
- Requires travel for quarterly planning and other onsite meetings. (approx. 4-6 times per year)
Employee Benefits:
We aim to protect our employees' wellbeing through a broad benefits offering. For example, we protect physical wellbeing through health, dental and vision insurance. We protect mental wellbeing through mental health benefits and an employee assistance program. We protect time away from work with a variety of paid time away benefits (e.g., paid time off, paid parental leave, short-term disability, and a cultural observance day). We protect financial wellbeing through contributions to healthcare accounts, a pension plan, and a 401(k) plan with Company matching. All employees are encouraged to protect their overall wellbeing by engaging in ProHealth Rewards, Protective’s platform to improve wellbeing while earning cash rewards.
Eligibility for certain benefits may vary by position in accordance with the terms of the Company’s benefit plans.
Diversity and Inclusion:
At Protective, we are committed to providing an inclusive culture where all employees are able to fully contribute and thrive. Our goal is to grow and develop our people, attract diverse talent and support strong, diverse communities.
We support diversity, equity, and inclusion by working to develop a culture of inclusion and belonging led by leaders who develop potential and embrace all skills and abilities. Our aim is to create an equitable environment for all leaders and employees that will drive performance and impact business strategy. In this way, we can increase overall diversity for leadership roles and pipelines of talent by maturing our hiring practices, robust development opportunities and focus on retention of key talent.
We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to being inclusive and attracting, retaining, and growing the talents of a diverse and inclusive workforce.
Accommodations for Applicants with a Disability:
If you require an accommodation to complete the application and recruitment process due to a disability, please email [email protected] information will be held in confidence and used only to determine an appropriate accommodation for the application and recruitment process.
Please note that the above email is solely for individuals with disabilities requesting an accommodation. General employment questions should not be sent through this process.
