Role Summary

The Product Owner is a core member of the empowered product team, partnering closely with the Product Manager, engineering, architecture, design, data, operations, and business stakeholders to translate product strategy into executable work. The Product Owner ensures validated opportunities are clearly defined, appropriately prioritized, and ready for delivery.

Working in close partnership with the Product Manager, the Product Owner maintains alignment between customer needs, product strategy, roadmap objectives, and team execution. The role helps accelerate learning and value delivery by ensuring the backlog reflects the product's priorities, outcomes, and evolving customer insights.

The Product Owner leverages customer knowledge, operational expertise, analytics, and emerging capabilities, including AI-enabled tools where appropriate, to improve backlog quality, delivery effectiveness, and team productivity.

The Product Owner plays a key role in helping the team identify, communicate, and reduce the risks of value, viability, usability, and feasibility by promoting customer understanding, solution clarity, delivery readiness, and cross-functional collaboration.

What You Will Own
Backlog Strategy and Readiness

• Maintain a healthy, prioritized backlog aligned to product goals, roadmap priorities, and customer outcomes.
• Translate product opportunities into features, user stories, defects, enablers, and acceptance criteria.
• Ensure work is appropriately sized, refined, and ready for delivery.
• Define clear acceptance criteria that reflect customer needs, business rules, compliance requirements, and operational considerations.
• Maintain traceability between customer problems, product objectives, and delivery work.
• Continuously evaluate backlog priorities based on outcomes, risk, dependencies, feedback, and business needs.

Solution Definition and Delivery Support

• Collaborate with Product Managers, engineers, architects, designers, and stakeholders to clarify requirements and solution intent.
• Facilitate story refinement, backlog grooming, and planning activities.
• Support decomposition of product initiatives into valuable, incremental releases.
• Ensure delivery teams understand business context, customer impacts, constraints, and dependencies.
• Make day-to-day delivery decisions that support progress within established product objectives and guardrails.
• Partner with engineering to balance customer value, technical feasibility, operational readiness, and delivery risk.

Customer and Business Context

• Establish an understanding of users, operational workflows, business processes, and customer journeys.
• Participate in customer interviews, journey reviews, user testing, and discovery activities led by Product Managers.
• Translate customer insights into actionable product requirements and backlog improvements.
• Identify operational challenges, customer pain points, and process inefficiencies that may warrant further discovery.
• Serve as a connection point between customer needs and delivery execution.

Team Delivery Effectiveness

• Participate actively in sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives, demonstrations, and team ceremonies.
• Monitor delivery progress and proactively remove ambiguity that may slow execution.
• Coordinate dependency management across teams and stakeholders.
• Facilitate communication between business partners, engineering teams, and product leadership.
• Promote continuous improvement of team processes, quality, and ways of working.
• Support predictable delivery without sacrificing customer value or quality.

AI-Enabled Product Ownership

• Leverage AI to improve backlog refinement, story creation, acceptance criteria development, analysis, documentation, and communication.
• Use AI-enabled tools to improve team productivity and reduce administrative overhead.
• Apply AI responsibly while maintaining appropriate human judgment, validation, accountability, and governance.
• Support identification of opportunities where automation, AI, or emerging technologies may improve customer or operational outcomes.
• Continuously evaluate and improve team workflows through responsible use of AI-enabled capabilities.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product Managers to align roadmap objectives and delivery priorities.
• Collaborate with engineering, architecture, UX, operations, compliance, security, legal, and business partners.
• Surface risks, assumptions, dependencies, and implementation concerns early.
• Build alignment through transparency, customer context, data, and shared understanding.
• Help create an environment of trust, accountability, learning, and continuous improvement

What Success Looks Like

• The backlog clearly reflects product priorities and intended outcomes.
• Stories are well-defined, appropriately sized, and consistently ready for development.
• Teams spend less time seeking clarification and more time delivering value.
• Dependencies, risks, and blockers are identified and addressed early.
• Delivery increments align to roadmap objectives and customer needs.
• The team delivers high-quality solutions with minimal rework.
• Product Managers, engineers, and stakeholders have confidence in backlog quality and delivery readiness.
• AI-enabled practices improve efficiency while maintaining quality, accountability, and customer focus.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• At least three years of experience in Product Ownership, Business Analysis, Product Management, Agile Delivery, Digital Product Development, or a related discipline.
• Experience working with Agile product teams in a cross-functional environment.
• Experience creating and refining user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, business rules, defects, and backlog items.
• Experience collaborating with engineering, architecture, operations, business, and product stakeholders.
• Experience using Agile delivery and collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, Mural, or similar platforms.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous and rapidly changing environments while maintaining delivery focus.
• Experience of Agile methodologies, product delivery practices, and modern software development lifecycle concepts.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting an empowered product team operating within a product-centric delivery model.
• Familiarity with customer journey mapping, user research, usability testing, and customer feedback analysis.
• Experience decomposing large initiatives into incremental releases that deliver measurable customer and business value.
• Experience working within a highly regulated industry such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, or government.
• Understanding of software architecture, APIs, cloud technologies, data platforms, integration patterns, and technical delivery concepts sufficient to collaborate effectively with engineering teams.
• Familiarity with product metrics, analytics, experimentation, and evidence-based decision making.
• Experience applying AI-enabled tools and automation to improve team productivity, backlog quality, delivery processes, or operational efficiency.
• Familiarity with responsible AI principles, governance considerations, and appropriate human oversight practices.

If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.

For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of 96,500 - 160,900 USD / yearly, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location.

This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus plan.

At The Cigna Group, you'll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits, with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you'll be offered several health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k), company paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year, paid holidays, and leaves of absence. For more details on our employee benefits programs, click here.