Product Owner

Product Owner

Appriss Retail is the total retail loss solution for omnichannel, unifying high-quality data across stores, online, and customer service to reduce returns, cut shrink, and manage incidents. Our products—Engage to reduce returns, Secure to cut shrink, and Incident to centralize visibility—help retailers move from reactive loss control to strategic profit protection. Together, they empower organizations to make better operations decisions, strengthen accountability, and put hundreds of millions back to the bottom line. Covering 40% of all U.S. transactions and active in 45 countries, Appriss Retail is trusted by 60+ of the top 100 U.S. retailers to deliver lasting performance improvement.

You'll own the Build & Deliver phases of our product development lifecycle (PDLC). Our Director and Senior Product Manager own the book-end PDLC phases: listening to signals, identifying opportunities, shaping and validating solutions, prototyping with customers, facilitating go-to-market activities, and measuring product performance. Once a feature or project is approved and validated, it hands off to you: you break it down, get it into the sprint machine, and drive it cleanly through to release. You are the connective tissue between "we've decided to build this" and "it's live and documented."

We're a small, tight-knit, and high-performing product team that genuinely likes working together—kind, caring, hardworking, smart, and low-ego. If you do great work with pride of ownership, have high honesty & integrity, treat engineers as respected partners, have a bias toward learning, and make the people around you better, you'll fit right in.

Essential Duties

What you'll own

• Translate agile PRDs into clear, granular features, stories, and requirements—with unambiguous acceptance criteria and reproduction steps.
• Decompose the big and the small: large initiatives into epics, then features, then stories, and single-feature efforts into detailed, buildable requirements.
• Keep Jira immaculate. Every ticket has its required fields filled, is correctly categorized, and is mapped to the right epic, initiative, release, and quarter. This is paramount—a focus on clean data here is non-negotiable.
• Maintain a clean, groomed backlog with multiple sprints of ready work staged ahead.

Self-directed delivery & prioritization

• Break work down independently, with minimal oversight—a true self-starter.
• Apply sound prioritization and make fast, defensible tradeoffs when stories compete for limited capacity. Or quickly raise your hand when prioritization is unclear.
• Triage bugs by real severity and urgency—not all bugs are created equal.

Agile ceremonies & dev collaboration

• Solo-run your team's day-to-day scrum ceremonies: refinement, backlog grooming, and daily stand-up.
• Partner effectively and respectfully with global dev teams, fostering an open, collaborative, and fun environment across every ceremony.
• Fluent in scrum best practices and anti-patterns, and in the Definition of Ready / Definition of Done.
• Know the paths by which a story, feature, or epic is reviewed with and approved by Product before it's cleared for deployment.

Cross-team coordination

• Own day-to-day dependency management across partner teams (e.g., data science), so companion and sister stories land together and on time.
• Leadership has your back on escalations that require negotiating across competing team priorities—you keep the work aligned; we handle the turf.

Release coordination, readiness & documentation

• Coordinate release execution with feature toggles and other phased or hidden-release techniques; strong grasp of release best practices.
• Write (or quickly learn to write) the documentation that ships around a release: release notes, user guides, and internal FAQs for CSMs, sales, and customer service.
• Ensure analytics tagging is scoped into every new development. You aren't responsible for the KPIs—but you make sure instrumentation is never the forgotten gap.

Communication & cross-functional support

• Proactively push status updates to need-to-know parties. Proactively surface risks, dependencies, and blockers before they impact delivery, with clear context on urgency and recommended next steps.

Required Qualifications

What you'll bring

• 3+ years as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, or similar delivery-focused role in an agile software environment.
• Demonstrated skill translating requirements into well-formed epics, features, and stories with clear acceptance criteria.
• Expert-level Jira discipline: field completeness, correct epic/initiative/release/quarter mapping, and relentless backlog hygiene.
• A self-starter's instinct for decomposition, prioritization, tradeoff calls under capacity constraints, and severity-based bug triage.
• Proven track record solo-running complex requirements-review meetings (refinement, grooming, stand-up) with dev teams; deep familiarity with ceremonies, best practices, and anti-patterns.
• Comfort coordinating cross-team dependencies so companion work from partner teams (e.g., data science) lands on time.
• Working knowledge of release mechanics—feature toggles, phased/hidden releases, and general release best practices.
• Ability to write, or quickly learn to write, multiple types of product documentation (release notes, user guides, internal FAQs).
• Basic understanding of analytics tagging and why performance measurement matters in product development.
• Excellent written and spoken communication, and a proactive-updates habit.
• Impeccable organization, follow-through, and integrity—you never misrepresent or oversell what you have or haven't done.
• Currently using AI in your work, or genuinely excited to learn.
• A kind, collaborative, respectful temperament suited to a close team.
• Willingness to travel (approx 15%).

Bonus Points

• Experience specifically building B2B SaaS.
• Retail experience (LP/AP, returns, POS, or similar)—a plus, not a requirement.
• Experience establishing or maturing a formal sprint-planning practice—we'd love someone to help us level up here.
• Technical curiosity with a track record of expanding your knowledge base. This role doesn't require deep technical skills on day one, but we'll actively support a curious, perpetual-student type in growing technical depth over time.

Benefits

At Appriss Retail, we offer a competitive and comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being at work and beyond. Benefits begin on your first day and include multiple medical plan options, dental and vision coverage, health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid parental leave, and supplemental coverage for life's unexpected moments. We offer generous paid time off, a 401(k) with immediate vesting and company match, short- and long-term disability, and free access to health and wellbeing resources such as Calm and Sworkit. You'll also have access to learning and development opportunities to help you grow your career. Our benefits support your well-being so you can perform your best in every part of life.

Reports to: Director of Product Management

Department: Product

Supervisory Duties: No

Travel Required: Up to 15%

Location/Work Region: Remote - United States

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to protected characteristics.