Product Owner

Summary

Join SonicWall as a Product Owner and prioritize, manage product backlogs for multiple teams offering diverse products. Lead transformational efforts in standardizing requirements gathering and release planning. Partner with Product Managers and Engineering Leaders to define requirements. Serve as a liaison between Product Management, Engineering, and QA teams, ensuring the delivery of products meeting customer demands. Share responsibilities in program-level planning. This highly visible role requires strong communication and collaboration skills.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a product owner OR business analyst
• Must have a strong desire to take ownership in defining and grooming requirements
• Strong verbal and written communication skills in American English
• Fosters an inclusive workplace where diversity and individual differences are valued
• Experience with using Atlassian Jira and Confluence (cloud instances)
• Experience with Agile and SAFe Agile practices; including Scrum, Lean, and Kanban frameworks
• Basic knowledge and/or familiarity with Aha! Roadmaps
• Self-starter with ability to effectively communicate the problem statement and recommended solutions
• Ability to develop rapport with the relevant internal teams and ensure use-case clarity to engineering teams
• Prior experience with SaaS applications, and/or with Cybersecurity products
• Demonstrated ability to drive requirement definition sessions, working closely with stakeholders across the entire organization and with developers
• Relevant experience or knowledge of public cloud infrastructure and cloud-native technologies is required
• Proven ability to recognize value and identify gaps that negatively impact end-users’ experience
• Demonstrable tech-savviness with a strong digital/technical literacy
• Demonstrable track-record of success and execution
• Proven analytical skills to understand metrics and comfortable with data
• Strong organizational skills; ability to manage and prioritize multiple projects and deadlines
• Ability to work collaboratively within and across department teams spread globally
• Growth mindset with desire to learn and biased towards action in the face of uncertainty
• Need little or no supervision to carry out the job responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Define and groom requirements at both the Epic and Story level, so that requirements are concise, well-formatted, and can be easily understood with no ambiguity
• Write requirements with a heavy emphasis on defining the customer journey workflows at a granular level
• Manage product backlogs to ensure all Epics and Stories are prioritized and regularly maintained
• Perform Release Planning based on the prioritized backlog to ensure Engineering Teams can scope for multiple sprints in advance
• Perform tactical responsibilities of decomposing Epics and Stories into additional smaller/split Stories as needed based on the Engineering teams’ feedback and capacities
• Manage, prioritize, and assess the impact of all work items (e.g., new features, defects, enhancements, etc.) to provide recommendations on whether the work should be accepted, or re-prioritized based on the value it brings to end-users
• Weigh business risks, issues, and impediments being experienced by the product team and actively assists with issue resolution
• Leverage data-driven metrics (e.g., sizing, budget, revenue-generation) and/or research conducted to justify reasoning for why items in product backlogs should be reprioritized
• Work with multiple teams within programs to identify cross-team dependencies that are blocking a release, feature, or functionality from being implemented
• Hold Product Managers accountable for ensuring the product vision and roadmaps are clearly defined and communicated so that Product Owners can effectively prioritize product backlogs
• Validate product direction by interacting with Product Managers to overcome ambiguity and uncertainty during product development and communicate well to internal stakeholders
• Participate in Sprint Planning and Standups to provide guidance and ensure Engineering Teams are planning their work to align with the prioritized product backlogs
• Assist with standardizing User Story writing best practices and estimation (story-pointing)
• Assist with standardizing release trains and sprint cadences across multiple teams
• Assist with introducing and standardizing Scrum ceremonies (e.g., standups, retros, demos)
• Assists with program and project-level plans related to schedule, scope and resources
• Assist with PI (program increment) planning and maintaining a PI board
• Review and accept or decline the output of development to ensure specified acceptance criteria have been completed
• Coach Product Managers to ensure initial requirements are well-written so that Product Owner(s) have the information needed to begin grooming
• Serve as an expert in Agile development and execution, regularly seeking out opportunities to enhance and improve operational processes

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in UI/UX projects is highly desirable