Technical product owner

Job Description: Technical Product Owner

The Technical Product Owner is responsible for translating business goals into clear, actionable technical requirements and ensuring delivery teams build solutions that maximize customer and business value. This role bridges product strategy, architecture, engineering, and operations by managing the product backlog, defining user stories and acceptance criteria, prioritizing technical and functional work, and driving execution across agile teams. Successful Technical Product Owners combine strong product judgment, technical fluency, stakeholder management, and data-driven decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the product backlog for technical and functional features, enablers, integrations, and technical debt.
• Partner with business stakeholders, architects, engineers, and designers to define product vision, roadmap, and release priorities.
• Translate business needs into epics, features, and user stories with clear acceptance criteria and technical context.
• Prioritize backlog items based on business value, customer impact, risk, dependencies, and implementation complexity.
• Work closely with engineering teams during sprint planning, refinement, demos, and retrospectives to ensure alignment and delivery readiness.
• Clarify requirements, answer team questions, and make timely tradeoff decisions to keep delivery moving.
• Align product decisions with enterprise architecture, security, compliance, reliability, and scalability requirements.
• Coordinate across teams to manage dependencies, integrations, and release readiness.
• Use customer feedback, analytics, operational metrics, and testing results to refine priorities and improve outcomes.
• Communicate progress, risks, decisions, and roadmap changes to stakeholders and leadership.
• Apply specification-driven development (SDD) practices and AI-assisted tools to generate specifications and develop prototypes that validate business asks and expected business value.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Business, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Analyst, or related delivery roles in software or digital product environments.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum or SAFe environments with cross-functional delivery teams.
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle, APIs, integrations, cloud platforms, data flows, and system dependencies.
• Proven ability to write user stories, define acceptance criteria, and manage/prioritize a product backlog.
• Experience collaborating with engineering, architecture, QA, UX, and business stakeholders.
• Strong conceptual, analytical, problem-solving, communication, and facilitation skills, including whiteboarding, written documentation, and executive-level presentations.
• Experience with delivery and product management tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms.
• Familiarity with specification-driven development (SDD) and experience using AI-assisted tools such as OpenSpec, Spec-Kit, Superpowers, Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent platforms to generate specifications and develop prototypes that validate business asks and expected business value.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certification such as CSPO, SAFe POPM, CSM, or equivalent agile/product credential.
• Experience in regulated enterprise environments such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, or other compliance-driven industries.
• Working knowledge of cloud services, platform architecture, data governance, DevSecOps, and observability practices.
• Experience supporting modernization initiatives, platform migrations, or digital transformation programs.
• Prior technical background in software engineering, systems analysis, solution architecture, or technical business analysis.

Core Skills

• Backlog management and prioritization
• User story development and acceptance criteria definition
• Executive communication, whiteboarding, and written documentation
• Technical requirement analysis
• Agile planning and release management
• Dependency management and risk mitigation
• Data-informed decision-making
• Customer-centric thinking
• Cross-functional leadership without direct authority
• Experience with SDD and AI-assisted spec/prototype generation tools to accelerate requirements definition and business-value validation

Success Measures

• Clear, prioritized, and delivery-ready backlog aligned to roadmap objectives
• Improved sprint predictability and release quality
• Reduced ambiguity in requirements and fewer delivery blockers
• Strong alignment between business needs and technical implementation
• Positive stakeholder and team feedback on collaboration and clarity
• Measurable business and customer outcomes from shipped features

Work Environment and Notes