Senior Product Owner

Joining the National Student Clearinghouse

By joining the National Student Clearinghouse, you can be sure that the work you do now will help shape the future of education and the workforce in the U.S. As the trusted source for higher education data since 1993, the Clearinghouse is the leading provider of transcript and data exchange services, automated enrollment and degree verifications, learner insights and research, and compliance solutions for schools, businesses, and learners nationwide. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Clearinghouse works with nearly 3,600 postsecondary institutions to meet their compliance needs and with thousands of high schools and districts to provide continuing collegiate enrollment, progression, and completion statistics about their alumni. In addition, the Research Center publications inform policymakers and business leaders about student educational pathways. Using our unique combination of data, analytics, and software to drive our mission, security and privacy is paramount. Join us as we continue to invest in our talent and new advanced technologies to unlock the power of data on behalf of all learners.

About the Role

The Senior Specialist, Product Owner, is a crucial role that fosters the strategic partnership between business and technology. In this role you will be responsible for collaborating, communicating, negotiating, and developing requirements and related customer value through business rules for existing and new software solutions in the market. You leverage your deep knowledge of multiple services, initiatives and work with other subject matter experts in the definition, development, testing, training, implementation, and support of functional requirements from product initiatives.

We practice Agile Methodologies for development, and this role serves as a standing leader in the Agile scrum teams. You will be responsible for running multiple initiatives at once, and using creative and innovative methods for analysis, design, documentation, and tool selection. Additionally, you'll also coach junior team members and provide cross-organizational support, as needed. The successful candidate has a deep understanding of nuance of multiple product lines and features, and the importance of documenting integration points, can identify dependencies with other systems, and can manage production support issues as escalated to the product team. This exciting role plays a pivotal part in Agile scrum teams.

Currently, this is a remote-first position, and this position may be required to periodically work on-site at our office and the frequency would depend on the department/division's requirements. Therefore, candidates must either reside within a reasonable distance to commute to our office or be willing to travel to our office in Herndon, when required.

How You Contribute

• Demonstrate the Clearinghouse's core competencies: Customer Focus, Optimizes Work Processes, Collaborates, Communicates Effectively, and Be Open and Authentic.
• Within Customer Focus, this competency includes understanding of technology and SaaS, data literacy skills, to build customer-centric solutions.
• This role must exhibit in-depth understanding the customer, the problem, business purpose of data, including how it is being used for a particular service and across the enterprise, how data is modeled, defined, validated, transformed, captured, cleansed, stored, reported, visualized and accessed.
• This role will leverage data knowledge and knowledge of the customer problem, to write business requirements, process flows, User Experience (UX), and user stories that accurately reflect enterprise data and provide additional data insights for education and business stakeholders.
• Support the Business Owner/Product Manager to understand the needs of the customer and key stakeholders, market/industry and define the scope for initiatives.
• Lead efforts to solicit, review, document, and refine requirements via interviews, workshops, group meetings, and/or existing systems documentation or procedures.
• Prioritize the backlog, including refinement and preparation (all stories business, enablers, and technical).
• Maintain a backlog to have a minimum of 2-3 sprints worth of refined work.
• Contribute to the successful on-time, within-budget and in-scope delivery of business initiatives.
• Define and develop user stories, wireframes, sequence diagrams, and data flow diagrams.
• Project manage the process of surfacing requirements, development and documentation of User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI), all testing (e.g. regression, acceptance, smoke, performance).
• Participate in smoke testing and lead acceptance testing for new products and features.
• Produce "As Is" and "To Be" process flow diagrams.
• Derive business requirements from use cases in an Agile environment.
• Create, revise, validate, and maintain business flow maps, business requirements, testing requirements, logging requirements, business rules, user stories, user flows, etc.
• Analyze the impact of new business requirements/user stories on the current application from both a business and technical perspective.
• Collaborate with the development team members to determine estimated delivery dates, dependencies, team velocity, challenges, quality assurance, user acceptance and overall performance of teams.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, designers, and other stakeholders and business owners to identify all cross-system interfaces and document the requirements.
• Proactively communicate and collaborate with cross functional team members to include account management, customer care, implementation, finance, development and other teams to successfully identify and resolve defects, bugs, technical support inquiries, and other issues.
• Decompose business requirements to technical specifications by working closely with technology teams' counterparts.
• Supports and mentors other Product Owners / Business Analysts in Agile methods and product knowledge.
• Accurately represent the needs of the business owner(s) to the development teams and vice versa.
• Participate in various Agile ceremonies.
• Understand and effectively communicate to the development teams and business owners all the data elements utilized by the service and understand their service details and processes.
• Create and foster positive and open communication channels between external and internal stakeholders.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, teamwork, innovation, and service excellence at the Clearinghouse by modeling transparency, accountability and proactively help resolve any product or project issues.

Position may be required to perform other duties as required. These essential functions are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these essential functions.

What You Bring to the Table

• Bachelors degree in IT, business, or related field.
• 8 years:
  • of overall experience in the education or technology industry.
  • of directly related experience in soliciting and defining requirements for mission critical business applications.
• Experience:
  • with Agile Methodology as a Product Owner or Business Analyst.
  • Embedding quality controls in work processes to assure uninterrupted operation.
  • Analyzing data for composing targeted and concise requirements and translating strategic and tactical goals.
• Demonstrated ability to:
  • Exemplify strong collaboration.
  • Solicit, define, and write business requirements from research, customer, market, and internal feedback to translate into user stories.
  • Have product knowledge and its impact to other product(s).
  • Identify tradeoffs in decisions and drive resolution of challenges across the organization.
  • Model solutions for a business process.
• Demonstrated proficiency:
  • Working with Agile principles, processes, driving decision making, and aligning the team/organization on goals and objectives.
  • Communicating and negotiating effectively and confidently with internal stakeholders from all levels of the organization, and external stakeholders to represent the product, department, and company.
  • Managing and prioritizing multiple initiatives to ensure successful, timely completion and issue-resolution.
  • Working with Microsoft Office Suite, and/or other collaboration tools.
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication, and effective presentation skills. Demonstrates the Clearinghouse's core competencies: customer focus, optimizes work processes, communicates effectively, collaborates, and is open and authentic.
• Must live within a commutable distance to Herndon, VA (preferred) or in one of the Clearinghouse's approved States for hiring purposes. Refer to our HR Policies Page, located on our Careers site at for more details.
• Must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. We do not intend to sponsor external applicants for