Ready to take the next step in your career? Maybe you’re looking for advancement opportunities, a better work-life balance, or just something new and exciting.

At Pekin Insurance, we strive to go Beyond the expected® in everything we do.

Position Overview

The Product Owner is responsible for setting, prioritizing, and accepting the work generated by a team to ensure the most valuable and proper functionality of the product and product team. A Product Owner will gather feature requests, schedule releases, and coordinate sprints. They need the ability to identify user needs, help a customer understand business value and work with cross-functional teams to manage a product release.

The efforts of a Product Owner are important for the company to deliver products not just according to the users, but the product that helps make our company vision a reality. In addition to the Product Owner’s typical responsibilities, they could be expected to play the role of Agile Team Member.

Essential Job Functions

• Responsible for representing and interfacing with the business user
• Uses clear goals to communicate the product vision at the beginning of every release and sprint so that the team understands and is equipped to realize it
• Executes business decisions and clearly communicates requirements through epics and stories so they are understood
• Prepares communication and presents status outside the team
• Develops plans for the creation, maintaining, prioritizing, and sequencing of the product backlog based on business value or ROI (Return on Investment)
• Develops user stories and acceptance tests from themes and features granular enough for a single sprint
• Prioritizes user stories by business value
• Assists in the prioritization of which user stories are scheduled into sprints
• Guides teams in planning, daily stand-up meetings (scrums), reviews, retrospectives, sprint and release planning, demos, and other Scrum-related meetings
• Reviews and orchestrates in signoff of deliverables and demonstrable code after every sprint and has the authority to accept or reject
• Develops and maintains standards for testing and progress visibility
• Develops internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information
• Participates in prioritization and resolution of defects/bugs
• Assists and sometimes leads the steering of a team to ensure delivery of business value
• Provides encouragement, recognition, and support to the team
• Works to help change the course of the team at the end of the sprint if necessary
• Performs other duties as assigned

Education & Experience

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, or a related field of study or equivalent work experience
• Typically requires 5-8 years of experience in the desired field or may have advanced level technical or business work experience

Preferred

• Prior experience in an Agile environment strongly preferred
• Project Management certification or successful completion of a recognized project management curriculum is preferred
• Knowledge of personal and commercial insurance products
• Experience with Guidewire Insurance Suite
• Guidewire Rating Experience
• Mathematical background

Certifications & Licenses

• N/A

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

Demonstrated knowledge of:

• Product/program management
• Agile methodology/development
• Business acumen

Demonstrated skills in:

• Managing budgets
• Management and influencing
• Teamwork, facilitation, relationship building, and negotiation

Demonstrated ability to:

• Proactively communicate technical topics in a clear, succinct, and relevant way
• Use technical knowledge and assess solutions for current and future needs across organizations
• Present to all levels of leadership
• Work with business areas to understand needs/requirements with an ability to provide innovative solutions