Product Owner

Job Title: : Product Owner

Location: Lisle, Illinois

Day 1 Onsite at customer location

Responsibilities:

• Lead the Performance Management product day-to-day. Establish near-term product goals and priorities, drive discovery and delivery, remove ambiguity, make or facilitate decisions, surface risks and dependencies, and maintain momentum from problem identification through adoption and measurable outcome.

• Own Performance Management problems and outcomes within the strategic direction established with Product Management. Translate business goals into clear problems to solve, measurable outcomes and prioritized product opportunities; challenge requests that are not supported by evidence or expected value.

• Work hands-on with Finance, Pricing, Product, Data Engineers and Software Engineers to understand the data required for Performance Management, including sources, definitions, ownership, quality, lineage, reconciliation and downstream consumption. Explore data, reports and applications directly to validate assumptions and outputs.

• Translate complex business and performance questions into testable product requirements. Document business processes, rules, data definitions, calculations, decisions, acceptance criteria and expected outcomes at the level needed for the team to build and validate the right solution.

• Partner with Product Management on product strategy, investment priorities and roadmap direction, while owning detailed discovery, product decisions, delivery leadership and adoption. Feed evidence and learning from the team back into strategy and future priorities.

• Maintain a clear, outcome-oriented Product Backlog and near-term delivery plan for Performance Management. Organize work around business problems and measurable outcomes rather than treating roadmap or backlog maintenance as the primary purpose of the role.

• Lead regular product demos, performance reviews and decision sessions. Clearly communicate what the team has learned, what reconciles or does not, key risks and dependencies, decisions required, progress against outcomes and what happens next.

• Build productive working relationships across Finance, Pricing, Service Product, Contract Management, Data, Engineering and other stakeholders. Challenge assumptions constructively, resolve competing requirements, drive decisions and escalate unresolved issues when necessary.

• Use data and evidence to make product decisions. Understand Service Product sales, revenue, cost, claims, margin and expected-versus-actual performance sufficiently to frame questions, identify anomalies, validate results and assess whether delivered capabilities are producing the intended outcome.

• Lead discovery into current business processes, reporting and system behavior to identify gaps, inconsistencies, dependencies, manual work and opportunities for simplification or modernization. Work with the team to trace issues to their underlying process, data or system cause.

• Facilitate focused working sessions with business and technical stakeholders to resolve ambiguity and drive decisions. Ensure decisions, owners and next actions are explicit and followed through to completion.

• Own outcomes beyond software delivery. Proactively identify issues, challenge assumptions, validate solutions with users and data, drive adoption and measure whether delivered capabilities improve Performance Management decisions and business results.

• Be hands-on with digital products, data products, reports and analytical tools. Personally explore workflows and datasets, investigate discrepancies, validate calculations and outputs, and work alongside engineers and business SMEs to understand why results differ.

• Lead product work within the delivery team, including refinement, planning, demos and other appropriate Agile ceremonies. Break product goals into clear Epics, Features and Stories with acceptance criteria, while adapting the process to keep the team focused on outcomes rather than ceremony.

• Define and measure product and business outcomes for Performance Management, including trusted portfolio coverage, expected-versus-actual variance, time to insight, variance explained, margin at risk identified or protected, analyst effort and adoption. Use measures to determine what to improve next.

Required Skills:

• 3+ years of progressively responsible experience in Product Ownership, Product Management, data/analytics product delivery, business analysis or a similar role leading cross-functional digital product work in an Agile environment.

• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous business problems, investigate them hands-on, frame clear problems and outcomes, and drive a cross functional team from discovery through delivery, adoption and measurable improvement.

• Excellent written, verbal and visual communication skills. Ability to explain complex business, data and technical topics simply; lead working sessions and product reviews; communicate decisions and trade-o s; and tailor messages to business, technical and leadership audiences.

• Demonstrated initiative, ownership and pragmatic problem solving. Comfortable working independently, challenging assumptions, making decisions with incomplete information, escalating when necessary and following issues through to resolution.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Product, Business, Information Technology, Data/Analytics, Finance, Engineering or a related field.

Desired Skills:

• Experience with data-intensive or analytical products supporting Finance, Pricing, product performance, contract performance or commercial decision-making.

• Experience working with modern product delivery and data platforms such as Azure DevOps, Databricks, Palantir Foundry, Power BI or comparable tools.

• Professional Certifications in Scrum, Agile, and Product Ownership

• Experience with domain-driven products, enterprise data concepts, data quality/reconciliation, semantic modelling or modern data architectures.

• MBA or equivalent

• Previous experience in Finance, Pricing, Service Products, Insurance, Warranty, Transportation Services or other businesses where revenue, cost, margin and performance must be understood across a portfolio.

• Understanding of connected vehicle, commercial vehicle, service contract, subscription, warranty or API/event-driven ecosystems.