Team Lead, Product Owner

Role Description

Supervise and lead a team of Product Owners to ensure success of the product by supporting teams in maintaining product focus and vision during and after roll-out of a product. Work closely with business stakeholders, product/project managers, and technical teams to understand, analyze, refine, prioritize, and communicate needs to ensure full understanding of project scope, objectives, and requirements. Work with Managers of Product to analyze results after product launch. Support one or more Product Development teams in efforts to engage all cross-functional teams within RouteOne’s owners and stakeholders to ensure success of RouteOne products.

Job Responsibilities

• Manage the product lifecycle from planning through development, launch, and ongoing product enhancements.
• Support the definition, development, and delivery of the product(s) following the RouteOne systems development life cycle.
• Regularly communicate with product stakeholders.
• Identify dealership and finance source problems through market research including visits to dealer and finance source customers.
• Translate dealer and finance source needs into clearly defined and detailed product requirements.
• Identify and resolve issues with key internal and customer stakeholders.
• Define the solutions for validated and known market problems by writing detailed requirements, user stories, and maintaining a product backlog.
• Work with one or more development team(s) to groom and refine the product backlog to ensure the development team works on priority items from the perspective of the stakeholders.
• Interact with customers to deliver enhancements to their specifications when custom functionality is required.
• Work with user experience designer to define how users will interact with the product(s).
• Understand the competitive landscape and expectations of persons interacting with the product (i.e., users and buyers).
• Ensure acceptance criteria are met.
• Coordinate, facilitate, and conduct regular product updates.
• Develop and maintain detailed release plans to facilitate external stakeholder expectation-setting and coordination.
• Provide input into long-term product roadmap.
• Ensure product objectives are met across organization through management of a team of Product Owners and Associate Product Owners, including monitoring workflow, meeting deadlines, and addressing issues, as well as identifying and mitigating risks.
• Communicate and coordinate appropriately across products and departments within the organization.
• Coordinate, facilitate, and conduct regular project reviews with each stakeholder across the organization.
• Coordinate with Legal and Security team to ensure any legal- or security-specific requirements are contemplated and addressed.
• Support dealer and finance source sales efforts as needed for assigned projects (including creation of sales materials and delivery of presentations).
• Act as subject matter expert for functional product area(s).
• Maintain safety, security, and privacy standards throughout all areas of responsibility.

Knowledge

• Strong knowledge of automotive financing processes (both dealer and finance source).
• Knowledgeable in technology (specifically software).
• Familiar with agile software implementation methodologies, specifically Scrum.

Skills

• Proficient in Microsoft Office products including but not limited to: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and Visio.
• Experience with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms.
• Familiarity with software mockup and prototyping tools such as Axure or Balsamiq.
• Familiarity with issue tracking tools such as JIRA.

Abilities

• Ability to think critically.
• Ability to work in a team environment.
• Effective time management skills.
• Experience in owning and managing projects as well as displaying strong leadership and facilitation skills.
• Ability to lead, mentor, and develop team members.
• Effective verbal and written communication skills, including presentation skills.
• Effective problem-solving skills, with a strong solution/implementation focus.
• High degree of flexibility, adaptability, and conflict management capability.
• Self-motivated, self-directed, and politically astute; able to communicate effectively with all levels of enterprise and customer organizations.

Other Essential Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in business or technical area or related work experience in a software development environment.
• 7+ years of overall Product Owner experience.
• Experience managing direct reports a plus.
• Sales and marketing experience, specifically focused on new product development.
• Pragmatic Marketing certification a plus.
• Willingness to travel - this position requires occasional travel to customer sites in North America (10%).