Product Owner, Sr

Job Description:

Cross-Domain and Delivery Expectations

• Lead a product line and drive its overall performance, strategy, and success across the full lifecycle from concept through launch, ongoing support, and retirement.
• Partner with and influence senior executives to align product strategy, roadmaps, plans, and implementation priorities.
• Own multi-team backlog prioritization against product outcomes and delivery constraints, not just stakeholder requests.
• Run recurring discovery and translate insights into roadmap and prioritization decisions with direct business impact.
• Drive release readiness, scope commitment, and acceptance criteria across multiple Agile teams.
• Create urgency, motivate cross-functional teams, and proactively address risks to meet committed launch dates.

Key Responsibilities & Outcomes

• Lead the assigned product line and drive its overall performance and success.
• Partner with and influence senior executives to align product strategy, roadmaps, plans, and implementation priorities.
• Manage the product line’s technical lifecycle from concept through launch, ongoing support, and retirement.
• Develop product strategy and detailed requirements by analyzing market segments, customer needs, and business opportunities; translate insights into a compelling, actionable roadmap.
• Define and prioritize functional requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and objectives for current and future products.
• Serve as an active member of Scrum teams, sharing accountability for product delivery, quality, robustness, and reliability.
• Own backlog refinement, prioritization, and readiness; clarify requirements and accept completed user stories.
• Run recurring discovery (interviews, usability testing, surveys, data analysis) and convert insights into roadmap decisions.
• Coordinate the development of tools and launch materials, including contracts, technical specifications, go-to-market content, and post-launch monitoring documentation.
• Prioritize defect resolution and operational activities to maintain product performance, stability, and availability.
• Collaborate with Marketing, Sales, and Service to develop product positioning, demonstrations, training, and sales enablement materials.
• Communicate roadmap status, decisions, and risks clearly to the team and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Mentor fellow Product Owners and other product team members.
• Build professional, collaborative relationships with internal and external clients and customers.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor’s degree required

Experience

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Owner with software for mission-critical products, working with Agile methodology.
• Proven experience in customer development, product definition, feature scoping, and balancing trade-offs for industry-leading business software products.
• Datacenter/IT Infrastructure experience required.
• Demonstrated experience leading a product line or multi-team initiative, with ownership of roadmap and measurable business outcomes.
• Experience running discovery and translating insights into prioritization decisions.
• Ability to write clear requirements, acceptance criteria, and release scope.
• Strong stakeholder alignment and presentation skills across engineering, design, and senior business partners.
• Background in engineering, technology, or UX preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with SaaS or cloud-based products in an enterprise environment.
• Experience with backlog management and discovery tooling (Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent).
• Experience in financial reporting, regulated communications, or other relevant Toppan Merrill business domains.
• Experience mentoring or coaching Product Owners at earlier career stages.

AI Use Expectations

• Discovery synthesis: Use AI-assisted tools to help cluster qualitative research data, identify patterns across interview transcripts, and accelerate affinity mapping across a product line. Validate all AI-generated themes against source material before presenting findings or making roadmap decisions.
• Requirements drafting: Use AI tools to generate draft user stories, acceptance criteria, and release notes. Review and refine all AI-generated requirements for accuracy, completeness, and alignment with stakeholder input before committing them to the backlog.
• Backlog analysis: Use AI-assisted tools to surface prioritization patterns, flag stale items, and identify dependency clusters across a multi-team backlog. Human judgment governs all prioritization and sequencing decisions.
• Competitive and market research: Use AI tools to summarize publicly available product reviews, industry trends, and competitor patterns to accelerate discovery. Cite sources and verify claims independently before incorporating into strategy artifacts.
• Stakeholder communication: Use AI tools to draft roadmap summaries, release communications, and executive briefings. Review and refine all AI-generated communications for accuracy and appropriate tone before distribution.

Accountability and Oversight

• You are accountable for every product decision made within your product line, regardless of whether AI tools contributed to the analysis. AI accelerates; it does not decide.
• Apply the same rigor to AI-generated output as to independently produced work. Do not present AI-generated artifacts as final without review and iteration.
• When mentoring Product Owners, model responsible AI use explicitly: demonstrate how to validate, critique, and improve AI output, not just how to prompt for it.
• Validate AI-assisted discovery synthesis and requirements against actual user and stakeholder input before treating them as final.