Product Owner ( DevOps )

Product Owner (DevOps)

Location: Hybrid (Bolingbrook, IL) Duration: 12 Months Contract MoI: Video Interview

The Product Owner for UBM DevOps Pod leads a newly established, cross-functional agile DevOps pod focused on supporting and optimizing digital and eCommerce operations within retail. The Product Owner ensures the pod is delivering the highest value by managing priorities across defect triage, deployment pipelines (CI/CD), infrastructure availability, production monitoring, and hyper care support.

Core Job Responsibilities:

• Product Delivery & Pod Accountability: Own the end-to-end delivery of operational features and capabilities supporting retail digital and eCommerce platforms. Prioritize backlog items, from production defect fixes to infrastructure enhancements, ensuring alignment with business goals and technical feasibility.
• Requirements Gathering & Translation: Collaborate closely with business teams, technical leads, engineering, and stakeholders to gather, clarify, and translate operational needs, business statements, and technical requirements into clear epics and user stories that the DevOps pod can act upon effectively.
• Backlog Prioritization & Strategy Alignment: Continuously prioritize and groom the product backlog to balance urgent production support issues with strategic enhancements, leaning into the broader business strategy while empowering the pod to focus on the right work at the right time.
• Release & Deployment Coordination: Work together with engineers, QA, and deployment teams to plan, execute, and monitor CI/CD releases ensuring smooth rollouts with minimal disruption to retail operations.
• Stakeholder Communication & Management: Act as the primary liaison between business, product, and technical teams—communicating status updates, managing expectations, and ensuring transparency on priorities, releases, and operational health.
• Production Monitoring & Incident Management: Oversee production monitoring metrics and support triage processes to identify, prioritize, and resolve defects impacting digital and eCommerce platforms, facilitating rapid incident response and root cause analysis.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with technical leads, developers product management, retail media business partners, and other stakeholders to foster continuous improvement in product quality, delivery efficiency, and operational excellence.
• Continuous Improvement: Lead retrospectives and feedback loops to enhance team processes, improve deployment cadence, and raise system availability and reliability.

Essentials for Success:

• Bachelor's degree in business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in product ownership or management within retail or eCommerce, with a strong focus on operations and DevOps.
• Proven track record working in Agile environments, translating complex business needs into technical deliverables.
• Strong understanding of retail digital and eCommerce operations, including production support, release management, and infrastructure availability.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to navigate diverse personalities and translate business requirements into actionable user stories for technical teams.
• Experience collaborating closely with technical leads and developers to ensure clear requirements and achievable scope.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, production monitoring tools, incident management, and infrastructure reliability best practices.
• Strong organizational and prioritization skills, capable of balancing urgent operational needs with strategic development work.
• Data-driven and analytical mindset with a passion for problem-solving and continuous improvement.
• Self-motivated with the ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment managing ambiguity while delivering results.
• Demonstrated ability to build strong partnerships across business and technical teams, driving alignment and operational excellence.