Product Owner

POSITION SUMMARY:  
The Product Owner defines product direction and development priorities to support NMDP’s mission to “save lives through cellular therapy.” As a key member of the Product and Agile Teams, they are accountable for the success, health, and readiness of the product backlog. This role partners closely with Product Managers, stakeholders, and customers to understand needs and ensure the most valuable work is delivered. The Product Owner brings deep knowledge of both the work, customer needs and operates within the product strategy, vision, roadmap, and outcomes, to translate product priorities and customer needs into clear, actionable work. They are a key partner with their assigned product and development teams, ensuring alignment and mitigating dependencies while promoting enterprise-wide standards. Acting as a bridge between business and technology, they collaborate with leadership to define and prioritize features in the roadmap. They are responsible for capturing clear, actionable requirements, preparing complete user stories and acceptance criteria, supporting the iterative delivery of high-quality solutions and ensuring the product vision for search at NMDP is consistently advanced.
ACCOUNTABILITIES:  
•    Partners with the Product Management team to set development priorities, define strategic initiatives, and manage the portfolio backlog in support of digital properties and enterprise goals.
•    Collaborates with stakeholders and customers to gather and validate problems, needs, and jobs to be done.
•    Manages iterative and incremental delivery of value to internal and external users by bringing a deep understanding of customer needs and the work to be done, ensuring prioritization of the most impactful features and enhancements.
•    Owns delivery of planned and unplanned work while continuously evaluating business value and trade-offs to inform prioritization decisions.
•    Leads backlog refinement and prioritization, making informed decisions based on operational, market, and user data. Identifies and validates hypotheses, assumptions, and risks to ensure the highest ROI and business impact.
•    Drives planning and release activities, setting clear expectations for delivery timelines and functionality. Maintains a strong cadence of delivery through active participation in team ceremonies such as sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives.
•    Communicates delivery progress and status updates consistently, including sprint and release communications, ensuring transparency and alignment across teams and stakeholders.
•    Engages proactively with stakeholders, responding promptly to inquiries and making decisions that maintain delivery velocity and team momentum.
•    Maintains a deep understanding of business processes and customer needs, while remaining open to new pathways and emerging technologies. Actively mitigates impediments to ensure successful sprint and release outcomes.
•    Translates product strategy into actionable tasks; ensuring clearly articulated user stories that align to the overall product vision. 
•    Communicates the product vision to the development team ensuring everyone understands the "why" behind the business value.
•    Writes and maintains clear, complete, testable, and consistently formatted user stories with explicit acceptance criteria, context, dependencies, and supporting details needed for shared understanding.
•    Uses the team's capacity and historical velocity to support realistic sprint planning, forecast delivery, and adjust scope or sequencing in partnership with the Agile team.
•    Reviews completed work against acceptance criteria, supports timely acceptance decisions, and helps ensure each increment meets the intended customer and business needs.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS: 
Ability to:
•    Works within Scrum and other Agile methodologies to drive highly successful, collaborative teams. Brings a flexible mindset and enterprise perspective to explore the best paths for solving customer needs.
•    Communicates effectively with excellent written and verbal skills, translating business and technology concepts for both technical and nontechnical audiences. Maintains a customer-first focus with a strong knowledge of functional and business areas.
•    Demonstrates a strong personal work ethic, committed to quality, continual improvement, and delivering excellent customer service. Operates with a growth mindset—eager to learn, test new ideas, and pivot quickly when needed.
•    Solves complex problems and makes sound decisions, even in the face of ambiguity, risk, and uncertainty. Readily takes initiative with a relentless focus on forward progress.
•    Manages multiple priorities with skillful negotiation, delegation, and conflict resolution. Highly collaborative and action-oriented, driving results through rapid cycles of test and learn.
•    Maintains confidentiality in handling sensitive information and records, while building new enterprise-wide capabilities and modeling scalable solutions.
•    Understands connections across multiple applications in a federated enterprise architecture, bringing an intimate understanding of the work to be done and the customers it serves.
•    Accommodates infrequent travel and as required, works extended hours to meet deadlines or support after-hours product releases.
    Education and/or Experience:
•    Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, Business Administration, Engineering or another related field preferred. However, upon evaluation, equivalent related experience and/or education may be substituted for degree requirement.
•    Two years previous experience as a product owner or related role.
•    Four years’ experience with defining and prioritizing requirements in an Agile environment.

Preferred Qualifications: (Additional qualifications that may make a person even more effective in the role, but are not required for consideration)
•    Experience working in a highly integrated technical environment