Job Description

About the role

This is a hybrid Product Owner / Technical Product Owner role with primary accountability for squad-level product delivery, technical acceptance criteria, and release readiness. This person will lead a technical squad within Procell InSite and translate validated customer and business needs into clear user stories, technical acceptance criteria, engineering-ready specifications, and release-ready product increments.

The Director of Product Management owns product strategy, roadmap priorities, and business outcomes. This role owns the execution layer: maintaining a sprint-ready backlog, clarifying technical requirements, coordinating dependencies, and ensuring the squad can deliver committed work on time and to specification.

Procell InSite sits at the intersection of embedded hardware, firmware, wireless connectivity, cloud telemetry, provisioning workflows, customer dashboards, and field installation operations. The right candidate will be comfortable translating across those layers and ensuring each release works as a complete system, not just as a collection of isolated features.

This role requires someone who can write sharp user stories and precise behavioral acceptance criteria, understands device-to-cloud interdependencies, and can reinforce sprint discipline across a squad operating in Azure DevOps (ADO), two-week sprints, and formal releases every two months.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

• Own and manage the squad backlog in Azure DevOps, including user stories, acceptance criteria, backlog refinement, and sprint readiness.
• Translate validated customer problems and prioritized roadmap needs into clear technical product specifications for firmware, cloud, device provisioning and installation lifecycle, and customer-facing workflows.
• Translate partner technical requirements into backlog items aligned to roadmap priorities.
• Define technical acceptance criteria covering functional behavior, integrations, performance, security, data flows, platform interactions, and edge-case behavior.
• Own backlog for platform security and compliance work, including authentication, certificate lifecycle, device identity, audit logging, and product-side regulatory requirements.
• Lead sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint review, and retrospectives for a two-week sprint cadence.
• Coordinate cross-squad dependencies across shared platform components, firmware, hardware, data interfaces, provisioning flows, and customer-facing experiences.
• Support delivery trade-off decisions by identifying scope, capacity, risk, and dependency impacts, and escalating decisions that affect roadmap, customer commitments, or release scope.
• Drive release readiness for the squad's contributions to each formal release every two months, including story completion, acceptance validation, known risks, and handoff readiness.
• Maintain clear visibility into sprint progress, blockers, dependencies, and release risks for product, engineering, and operations leadership.
• Partner closely with firmware, cloud software, UX/CX, hardware, operations, and customer-facing stakeholders to ensure the product ships as a reliable end-to-end system.
• Partner closely with the Solutions Engineer to translate field deployment observations, customer IT requirements, and partner technical input into prioritized, technically scoped backlog items.

What Success Looks Like

• Engineering enters each sprint with clear, testable, technically complete stories.
• Dependencies across firmware, cloud, hardware, provisioning, UX, and field operations are identified early and managed proactively.
• Releases ship with fewer surprises, fewer ambiguous requirements, and stronger acceptance discipline.
• Customer feedback is converted into actionable backlog items without losing the technical detail needed for execution.
• Product, engineering, and operations leadership have clear visibility into release readiness, delivery risks, and trade-off decisions.
• The squad consistently delivers high-quality increments that support Procell InSite's transition from MVP to commercial scale.

Qualifications

Qualifications
Must Haves:

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, Computer Engineering or similar.
• 5+ years of experience as a Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, or Product Manager, or 5+ years as an engineer (firmware, embedded, software, or cloud) with hands-on Product Ownership experience. Background in IoT, connected hardware, embedded systems, device-cloud, or SaaS products.
• Strong user story craft and experience writing precise, behavioral, testable acceptance criteria.
• Demonstrated experience shipping products or features that involve both device-side and cloud-side work, such as firmware + cloud, embedded + SaaS, or connected hardware + customer-facing software.
• Working familiarity with WiFi connectivity (e.g., 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax standards and their throughput, range, and frequency-band tradeoffs), device provisioning protocols (e.g., Soft AP, OTA, zero-touch provisioning), and IoT communication patterns sufficient to write precise behavioral acceptance criteria for device-to-cloud flows.
• Working fluency in Agile product development, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, retrospectives, dependency management, and release management.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, with sound judgment on when and how to escalate risks, blockers, and dependencies.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment where product, engineering, operations, and customer needs must be balanced pragmatically.

Nice to have:

• Hands-on experience using Azure DevOps for backlog management, sprint operations, dashboards, and release tracking.
• Familiarity with hardware manufacturing handoff, field installation workflows, or connected-device deployment operations.
• Hospitality, cruise, hotel-tech, commercial real estate, facilities operations, or enterprise IoT background.
• Experience working with distributed teams, external development partners, or multi-squad product organizations.

Why this role

You will be part of a small but rapidly growing organization. This Product Owner role is one of the most direct levers between customer feedback and shipped product.

The backlog decisions this role makes each sprint will directly shape the evolution of the Procell InSite platform, the quality of our releases, and the speed at which we scale from MVP to commercial deployment.

You will work alongside the Director of Product Management, other Product Owners, our UX/CX Lead, our firmware lead, our cloud software lead, and cross-functional partners across engineering, operations, and commercial teams