Product Owner

Job Description
This is an onsite role; only local candidates will be considered.

The Product Owner will support the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). This role serves as the primary bridge between business stakeholders, IT teams, technical product owners, architects, developers, QA, data teams, vendors, and executive leadership. The Product Owner partners with business customers to translate strategic goals, operational needs, and business rules into clear, actionable product requirements. This individual owns and prioritizes the product backlog, leads requirements discovery activities, and leverages AI-enabled tools to improve the speed and quality of requirements development and stakeholder communication. The role requires close collaboration with engineering teams to interpret technical constraints and tradeoffs, as well as ongoing validation of AI-assisted work products for accuracy and alignment with source documentation.

Responsibilities:

• Serves as the primary bridge between business stakeholders, IT teams, technical product owners, architects, developers, QA teams, data teams, vendors, and executive leadership.
• Partners with business customers to understand strategic goals, operational needs, pain points, business rules, and desired outcomes, translating them into actionable product requirements.
• Leads requirements discovery sessions, stakeholder interviews, workshops, story-mapping sessions, backlog refinement, sprint planning support, product demonstrations, and acceptance activities.
• Develops and maintains product visions, roadmaps, epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, use cases, process flows, decision tables, business rules, and requirements traceability artifacts.
• Owns, prioritizes, refines, and maintains the product backlog based on customer value, strategic objectives, delivery risk, regulatory obligations, technical dependencies, team capacity, and release sequencing.
• Collaborates with technical product owners and engineering teams to interpret technical documentation, architecture diagrams, interface specifications, APIs, data models, and implementation tradeoffs.
• Defines measurable product outcomes, KPIs, acceptance measures, release goals, and success criteria, and communicates status, risks, dependencies, and decisions to stakeholders and leadership.
• Supports user acceptance testing by developing business scenarios, validating coverage, coordinating business participants, and confirming delivered functionality satisfies approved acceptance criteria.
• Uses AI-enabled tools to improve the speed and quality of requirements development, technical-document analysis, user-story refinement, backlog planning, dependency analysis, and stakeholder communications.
• Reviews and validates all AI-assisted output for accuracy, completeness, traceability, confidentiality, bias, and intellectual-property concerns prior to incorporation into project work products.
• Maintains product documentation, decision logs, change history, requirements traceability, backlog health metrics, release notes, and risk and dependency logs.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications: Candidates must meet all minimum qualifications

• 8 years of experience serving as a Product Owner, Senior Business Analyst, Product Manager, or comparable role bridging business and technology teams.
• 8 years of experience eliciting, analyzing, documenting, and validating complex business, functional, and nonfunctional requirements.
• 8 years of experience developing and refining epics, features, user stories, acceptance criteria, use cases, process flows, and requirements traceability.
• 8 years of experience owning and prioritizing product backlogs in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or hybrid delivery environments.
• 8 years of experience defining product roadmaps, release plans, measurable outcomes, KPIs, dependencies, risks, and delivery priorities.
• 5 years of professional experience using generative AI or AI-enabled productivity tools to support requirements, technical-document analysis, user-story refinement, backlog planning, or stakeholder communications.
• 5 years of experience reviewing and validating AI-assisted output for accuracy, confidentiality, traceability, and alignment with source materials.
• 5 years of experience with AI governance, responsible AI practices, prompt design, retrieval-augmented workflows, or enterprise AI adoption.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Current Product Owner or product-management certification such as CSPO, PSPO, SAFe POPM, or an equivalent recognized certification.
• Current Agile and/or Scrum certification.

Additional Requirements:

• Local candidates only; must currently live within 50 miles of the Austin, Texas work location.

Work Location and Schedule:

Location : Austin, TX

Schedule : Monday through Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, excluding State holidays.

Work Arrangement : Onsite