Product Owner Automotive & Intermodal
Product Owner
Our Product Owners (PO) are key members of an Agile Product Management team. The Product Owner is responsible for writing and refining user stories as well as maintaining a prioritized backlog for the sprint team. The PO drives and facilitates user story refinement and prioritization sessions ensuring the backlog contains 2-3 sprints of ‘ready work’ for development. The role must remain highly available to the development teams during each sprint in order to answer questions and provide clarity to user stories.
The Product Owner is also crucial in development validation and quality control. The role will write test scripts, complete product testing for the current sprint, and coordinate business owner testing for releases. The PO will accept user stories as done, ensuring the acceptance criteria has been met. After sprint completion, the Product Owner plays a key role in conducting the sprint retrospective with the team.
The Product Owner works closely with the Sr Product Owner to ensure complete sprint demos are provided. The role supports the Sr Product Owner in their review of change impact.
The Product Owner in the Intermodal and Automotive business areas serves business owners in the following business groups to deliver measurable value to each respective business group and Norfolk Southern at large:
- Intermodal Customer Service
- Intermodal Marketing
- Intermodal Operations
- Intermodal Asset Planning and Optimization
- Automotive Customer Service
- Automotive Marketing
- Automotive Operations
Principle Duties:
- Draft user stories with acceptance criteria for the next 2-3 prioritized sprints or features
- Collect business needs from the business owners
- Develop understanding and expertise of business area domain knowledge, objectives, and goals in order to facilitate solution requirements from business owners.
- Validate user stories with Sr. Product Owner ahead of sprint planning
- Refine user stories in the backlog based on Sr. Product Owner guidance and business needs
- Facilitation of meetings with business owners to validate user stories
- Facilitation of sprint read-out to business owners at the start of each sprint to share outcome of Sprint Planning
- Escalate impediments to Sr. Product Owner
- Coordinate business owner testing for release
- Write test scripts based on acceptance criteria for business owner testing
- Complete product testing for current sprint
- Responsible for effective sprint stand ups
- Facilitate sprint retrospective with scrum team
Job Related Experience:
Minimum Level: Less than 1 year
Preferred Level: 1-3 year
Education:
Preferred Level: Bachelor’s degree in business management, computer science or related.
Technical Skills:
- Strong business analytical skills with the capability of identifying, analyzing, synthesizing product use data.
- Ability to effectively and efficiently connect with leadership, technical and non-technical audiences while employing a high degree of collaboration and influence.
- Strong requirement facilitation skills and proven ability to write concisely and clearly for different audiences.
Skills and Abilities:
- Communication
- Critical Thinking
- Prioritization
- Collaboration
- Analytical
- Candor
- Informed Risk-Taking
- Creativity
- Project Management
- Technical/Analytical
- Negotiation with Stakeholders