Web Application Scanning (WAS) Product Owner

Job Overview

The Product Owner serves as the customer proxy to the Agile team. Working as part of the Product Management team, they will own, define, and prioritize the team backlog, establish story acceptance criteria, drive content via prioritized user stories, obtain customer validation and accept stories, ensuring that the solution effectively addresses overall program priorities while maintaining technical integrity.

This position will typically be supported by more senior Product Owners in fulfilling their responsibilities, and will increasingly work independently as they gain competence, guiding an Agile Team to deliver value.

While this position will be attentive to the needs of the Agile team, we are looking for a Product Owner who wants some customer face time and regular interaction with Services and Sales Engineering. This individual should also be familiar with building feedback loops between the Agile team, Customer Support, SaaS Ops, and Services.

Key Responsibilities

Product Ownership

• Assist in continuous market research and assessment activities to ensure the team is aligned to the market opportunities, and able to react quickly to changing market dynamics.
• Assist in building customer and user insights into all stages of the planning and execution process, ensuring the continuous validation of features and stories with Customers and users.
• Build feedback loops between the Agile team, Customer Support, SaaS Ops, and Services
• Proactively analyze, report, and recommend changes to the product based on data from feedback loops
• Participate in Services and Sales Engineering technical enablement sessions
• Participate in Voice of the Customer sessions
• Advocate for the customer when making trade-offs or prioritization decisions

Program Increment (PI) Planning

• Assist in Program Increment (PI) Planning, including:
  • Support preparation of presentation materials critical to the PI planning process.
• Actively participate in the PI Planning process, including:
• Work in close partnership with assigned Agile Team, providing business and customer context to the planning activities.
• Lead the definition of User Stories and Story Acceptance Criteria in partnership with the Agile Team.
• Work with the team to define the definition of ready/done.
• Lead User Story prioritization.
• Draft the Agile Team Program Increment objectives/project charter.
• Able to facilitate and gather high level 't-shirt size' estimates from engineering to support long term planning and decision support

Iteration Planning

• Lead the on-going refinement of the Team Backlog, including:
  • Story Prioritization
  • Sizing of stories
• Actively support the Agile Team during iteration planning, including:
• Lead story refinement and elaboration, ensuring stories are clear, unambiguous, and ready for the team to work on.
• Own definition of story acceptance criteria.
• Accept the final iteration plan during the iteration planning meeting.
• Own and communicate the definition of the Sprint Goals on behalf of the Agile Team.

Program Increment Execution

• Attend Agile Team ceremonies including Daily Stand-ups or Retrospectives as needed.
• Support the Team Demo, including:
  • Facilitating a part of the system demo.
  • Accept stories into the backlog, including validation that the story meets its acceptance criteria and definition of done.
• Participate in and contribute to the Retrospectives/Inspect and Adapt sessions.

Typical Role Definition

Professional Staff. An intermediate level professional role. Some evaluation, originality or ingenuity required to perform tasks. Knows and applies the fundamental concepts, practices, and procedures of a particular field.

Job-Specific Authority and Scope

• Generally works without consulting their manager.
• Independent decisions are made daily.
• Examples of typical decisions without manager consultation:
  • Builds, prunes, prioritizes, and maintains the team backlog.
  • Accepts the final iteration plan during the iteration planning meeting.
  • Accepts stories into the baseline.
• Typically has no direct reports.
• Typically has no total staff.
• Typically has a global geographic focus.
• Typically does not manage a budget.

Business Travel and Physical Demands

Business travel of approximately 10 or less percent yearly is expected for this position.

Physical demands:

• Office environment. No special physical demands required.

Skills & Requirements

Preferred Education

Bachelor's degree or global equivalent in a related field.

Work Experience

Typically 2 or more years in an industry related role. Will typically have worked in technical support, system administration, or product development type roles with exposure to marketing.

Skills & Competencies

• Market Knowledge
  • Has some experience with Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and/or Vulnerability Management solutions
  • General understanding of overall security testing market and segments.
  • Understanding of Competitor products and alternative solutions.
  • Understands the Security Manager persona
  • Understands the SDLC and DevSecOps market trends
• Customer Centricity
• Demonstrates empathy for customer needs and expectations.
• Understands how to communicate customer needs and expectations to various internal stakeholders.
• Understanding of the sales process, customer personas, and the customer journey.
• Understanding of continuous and customer-centric validation techniques.
• Ability to communicate the product vision to help drive the product team towards value.
• Is an emerging servant leader.
• Validates early and often with customers, prospects, and industry experts.
• Not shy to ask for additional clarification or information when writing detailed requirements
• Working Technology and Solution Domain knowledge.
• Able to serve as a critical voice in the decision process and the leadership of the product.
• Exchanges product and technical ideas with the product team.
• Able to clearly communicate specific, measurable, and realistic non-functional requirements
• Good understanding of JavaScript, web browsers, JSON/XML, or similar web technologies
• Concept and Product Development
• Technical Competency

Certifications

Certified Scrum Product Owner preferred.

Careers

Veracode was founded by world-class security experts - and it continues to attract top problem solvers in the industry. We take pride in the diverse and electrifying culture our employees create. With personnel located across the United States and around the world, we boast a new and exciting approach to how we do business. Our collaborative environment fosters learning and growth within our employees through friendly discussions, hackathon projects and everyday interactions.

At Veracode, we offer a fundamentally different approach to application-layer security - one that's simpler and more scalable than legacy on-premises approaches. Our subscription-based service combines a powerful, cloud-based platform with deep security expertise and best practices for managing enterprise-wide governance programs so that enterprises can speed their innovations to market - without sacrificing security. It's all of these things combined with a little food and a lot of fun that make Veracode a great place to work.