Product Owner

Product Owner

BSN SPORTS, a Varsity Brands Company - the recognized leader in team athletic gear

For over 50 years, BSN SPORTS has been the largest team sporting goods equipment and apparel distributor of choice in the United States. Our 3,000 BSN SPORTS employees strive to support the heart of the game by putting valuable time back into the day of coaches and administrators through excellent service platforms. Our company mission is simple: save coaches and administrators time with everything they do off the field so they have more time to impact young lives on it.

Location: Onsite 4 days per week at Farmers Branch TX Varsity Brands HQ

The product owner supports and progressively expands ownership of the overall digital experience, product needs, and continuous-improvement priorities for one of BSN SPORTS' primary business channels: club, collegiate, or institutional.

This role serves as a primary product representative for the assigned channel, partnering with business stakeholders, executive leadership, commercial teams, customers, frontline employees, and application-aligned portfolio product owners. The position will identify opportunities, evaluate customer and business needs, contribute to prioritization decisions, and translate channel objectives into coordinated product initiatives across BSN SPORTS' digital platforms.

Portfolio product owners are aligned to applications and platforms including BSNSports.com, My Team Shop, Sideline Stores, and Team Art Locker. The product owner will partner with the appropriate portfolio product owners and senior product owners to ensure channel needs are understood, prioritized, and delivered through the relevant application roadmaps. Unresolved conflicts will be elevated to the executive steering committee for final direction. This role develops a strong understanding of how customer value, business priorities, and technical feasibility influence product decisions across the assigned channel.

The product owner will support and contribute to product initiatives from discovery through launch and adoption. They will remain actively engaged in discovery, requirements, prioritization, testing, release readiness, and post-launch adoption, while maintaining lighter involvement during active software development and continuing to build expertise in product ownership, agile delivery practices, customer discovery, and data-informed decision making.

In addition to major initiatives, the role will maintain and prioritize a continuous backlog of smaller enhancements, customer pain points, defects, technical improvements, and operational-efficiency opportunities while developing the judgment and product management skills needed to independently own increasingly complex products and initiatives over time.

Commercial teams retain accountability for revenue and business results. The product owner focuses on customer experience, product outcomes, adoption, usability, operational effectiveness, and translating channel needs into technology-enabled solutions.

Working under the guidance of more senior product owners, this role develops the knowledge, judgment, and product management capabilities necessary to progressively assume greater ownership of product strategy, prioritization, customer outcomes, and product performance.

Channel experience & strategy

• Develop and maintain a comprehensive understanding of the assigned channel, including customers, users, business processes, operational needs, pain points, and strategic priorities
• Serve as a primary product representative and advocate for the overall digital experience of the assigned channel
• Partner with business stakeholders and executive management to understand channel priorities and support major roadmap decisions
• Translate channel strategies, customer needs, and operational challenges into clear product opportunities and prioritized initiatives
• Evaluate opportunities based on customer impact, strategic alignment, adoption potential, operational value, effort, risk, dependencies, and expected outcomes with guidance from senior product owners as appropriate
• Maintain and continuously refine a channel-level roadmap identifying major initiatives, experience improvements, capability gaps, and cross-application dependencies
• Ensure the channel experience remains cohesive when customer journeys span multiple applications, systems, and operational teams
• Develop a strong understanding of how customer needs, business priorities, and technical feasibility influence product strategy and prioritization

Stakeholder engagement & prioritization

• Build strong working relationships with channel leadership, commercial, operations, sales, customer service, marketing, finance, technology, and other business functions
• Facilitate discussions to understand competing needs, clarify tradeoffs, and contribute to prioritization decisions
• Present recommendations, supporting analysis, options, dependencies, risks, and tradeoffs to executive management for review with guidance from senior product owners
• Establish transparent prioritization criteria and ensure stakeholders understand how and why initiatives are sequenced
• Communicate roadmap decisions, initiative status, product outcomes, constraints, and changes to appropriate stakeholders
• Escalate unresolved cross-channel, cross-application, or resource conflicts to the executive steering committee through appropriate product leadership
• Support steering committee decisions with clear business context, customer impact, data, dependencies, and alternatives
• Develop effective stakeholder management, communication, and influence skills while partnering across cross-functional teams

Partnership with portfolio product owners

• Partner with application-aligned portfolio product owners responsible for BSNSports.com, My Team Shop, Sideline Stores, Team Art Locker, and other relevant platforms
• Clearly communicate channel needs, desired outcomes, customer problems, priorities, and success measures
• Collaborate to determine which applications, platforms, or services should deliver a requested capability
• Ensure channel requirements are incorporated into appropriate application roadmaps and product backlogs
• Coordinate initiatives requiring changes across multiple products, applications, or delivery teams
• Participate in cross-portfolio planning to identify dependencies, sequencing requirements, shared capabilities, and conflicts
• Balance channel-specific needs with enterprise platform strategies, technical sustainability, and the needs of other channels while developing an understanding of product tradeoff decisions
• Elevate conflicts that cannot be resolved collaboratively to the executive steering committee for final direction through senior product leadership as appropriate

Customer and user discovery

• Conduct regular discovery with customers, users, and frontline employees to identify unmet needs, recurring pain points, experience gaps, and improvement opportunities
• Engage coaches, athletic directors, club owners, collegiate personnel, sales professionals, players, parents, customer-service teams, and operational users as appropriate
• Use interviews, observation, surveys, journey mapping, usability testing, feedback sessions, support data, and analytics to gather insights
• Validate that proposed solutions address meaningful customer or operational problems before significant development investment is made
• Partner with UX, research, analytics, and business teams to develop customer journeys, personas, experience maps, and problem statements
• Evaluate stakeholder requests against customer evidence, usage data, strategic priorities, and broader channel needs
• Maintain an organized repository of customer insights, feedback themes, experience gaps, and validated opportunities
• Continuously build expertise in customer discovery, product research, and data-informed decision making to strengthen future product recommendations

Initiative ownership and delivery

• Lead assigned channel initiatives from initial concept through discovery, prioritization, approval, delivery, launch, and adoption for assigned products, features, or initiatives appropriate to the role's scope and experience
• Define the business problem, target users, desired outcomes, scope, success measures, assumptions, dependencies, risks, and constraints
• Partner with business analysts, UX, portfolio product owners, architecture, engineering, and delivery teams to establish clear requirements and execution readiness
• Participate actively in discovery, solution definition, requirements reviews, roadmap planning, UAT, launch readiness, and post-launch evaluation
• Maintain lighter involvement during active development while remaining available to clarify priorities, answer business questions, review material scope changes, and resolve escalated decisions
• Review proposed solutions to confirm they address the intended channel need and preserve the desired customer experience
• Support creation and approval of epics, business requirements, user journeys, business rules, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes
• Participate in product demonstrations and key milestone reviews
• Coordinate with stakeholders to ensure operational processes, policies, support models, and customer-facing experiences are prepared for launch
• Identify and escalate risks, dependencies, decision gaps, and adoption barriers
• Partner with delivery and engineering teams to understand schedules, constraints, and risks without owning engineering delivery dates or day-to-day development execution
• Develop expertise in balancing customer needs, business priorities, and technical considerations while building end-to-end product ownership capabilities

Backlog and continuous improvement

• Create, maintain, and prioritize a channel-level backlog of improvement opportunities
• Balance strategic initiatives with smaller delivery-ready items
• Include customer pain points, experience enhancements, defects, technical improvements, operational efficiencies, usability improvements, analytics needs, process improvements, and stakeholder requests
• Refine backlog items based on new information, customer feedback, performance data, implementation learnings, and