Senior Product Owner - Customer Service

Senior Product Owner, Technology Products

As a Senior Product Owner, Technology Products at Highmark, you will serve as a pivotal leader in the development and delivery of innovative technology products that advance our mission within the healthcare industry. In this role, you will champion the product vision, strategy, and roadmap, driving successful outcomes through strong agile principles and deep collaboration with cross-functional teams and stakeholders. This position demands a proactive and strategic thinker with a proven ability to translate complex business needs into actionable product backlogs, ensure exceptional product quality, and effectively communicate progress to leadership. Your responsibilities will include defining and articulating the product vision, strategy, and roadmap, ensuring alignment with Highmark's strategic objectives and market trends, and leading cross-functional agile teams by prioritizing and managing the product backlog, defining clear user stories and acceptance criteria, and ensuring efficient sprint execution. You will collaborate extensively with internal stakeholders, such as Product Management, business leaders, and external clients, to gather requirements, negotiate priorities, and communicate product updates and value realization. Furthermore, you will act as the voice of the user, leveraging market trends and customer feedback to identify enhancement opportunities and drive the iteration of existing features in partnership with UX. You will also take full ownership of the product development process, from concept through launch and ongoing iteration, ensuring high-quality deliverables and accurate tracking of product value and metrics, while providing mentorship and guidance to other Product Owners to foster their growth and ensure consistency in product ownership practices.

Essential Responsibilities

• Empower teams to manage their work by setting clear priorities and scope from the team backlog. Make trade-offs and negotiate with stakeholders based on team capacity to determine the backlog. Develop and maintain product delivery roadmap
• Collaborate with stakeholders such as external clients, product management, portfolio leaders, and others in the creation and communication of the product vision, strategy, and roadmap. Represent the product in mid-level governance meetings. Track and provide status to leadership.
• Effectively navigate both Product Management and Product Ownership roles, collaborating with external customers and the internal product team.
• Utilize market trends and customer feedback provided by stakeholders to identify opportunities for product enhancements. Act as the voice of the user, understanding their needs and challenges to drive the iteration of existing product features in collaboration with UX.
• Drive the product development process, from concept to launch, ensuring high-quality deliverables. End to end ownership over the delivery of new features and improvements to existing features. Key player in solution estimation
• Servant-Leader for a cross functional team or teams with a portfolio of several products. Ability to work with agile program and team metrics. Empower team to manage their work by setting clear priorities and scope from the team backlog,
• Accountable for technology product value; comprehends and consults with business regarding their value realization
• Provide guidance and mentorship to Product Owners
• Incorporate stakeholder feedback when needed and clearly articulate team backlog items and acceptance criteria to the team. Communicate product updates, progress, and challenges to executive leadership and other relevant stakeholders.
• Prioritize and own the team backlog of the work to be performed. This includes ensuring that the backlog remains sufficient to support optimal team allocation for multiple (3+) Sprints. Proactively identify new initiatives/themes working with clients and product management. Fully own resolution to backlog challenges including size (to support multiple Sprints), business priority alignment, and timely dispute resolution.
• Clearly communicate business friendly release notes with operational impacts and product issues to business stakeholders
• Accepts stories as "done" from the team, ensuring that the stories have been developed, tested, and meet the defined acceptance criteria.
• Responsible for accuracy of team data representing targeted outcomes; OKRs and KPI's. Monitors and adds metrics to continuously provide stakeholders with an updated view of the product's success.
• Other duties as assigned or requested.

Education Required

• Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration, Engineering, or similar discipline

Experience

• Required: 5 years of Product Ownership, Strategic Consulting or Design Thinking OR Product Development & Management, Project/Program Management

Skills

• Demonstrated ability to work with external clients/ foster positive relationships and outcomes
• The ability to consult with the technical team to translate business requirements into technical stories.
• Agile methodology and software development
• Prioritization, Consultation, negotiation, and collaboration
• A keen understanding of the depth and breadth of business applications (upstream and downstream) and to think more broadly.
• Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills; excellent interpersonal skills;
• Cross-functional team collaboration and adaptable to change
• Strong understanding of the healthcare industry
• Exposure to supporting multiple products (within the same product area)