Position Summary:

The Sr. Product Owner bridges the gap between product strategy and development. They must be a proactive participant in this role and responsible for the product backlog, organizing sprints, and are expected to answer questions from developers as needed. This role is critical for managing the product backlog and ensures the prioritization of user stories for upcoming sprints and is a liaison for the development team.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with the development team to align backlog prioritization with strategic goals, ensuring effective translation of product management initiatives into executable tasks.
• Break down epics into user stories, arrange and prioritize sprints, and clearly define team goals at each sprint's start.
• Provide demonstrations to both business and technical stakeholders at sprint conclusions, offering a comprehensive overview of progress and facilitating stakeholder feedback.
• Actively participate in evaluating development stages, address development queries regarding story rationale, and contribute to business case documentation for enhanced decision-making.
• Work in tandem with product managers to refine the product roadmap, including developing user personas, journey maps, and a prioritized backlog, while also supporting go-to-market strategies for successful product adoption.
• Manage operational issues through daily triage, collaborate on trade-off decisions, and offer a holistic view on how business processes and system configurations impact user experience.
• Conduct market research, leverage data for insights, and recommend product strategies that align with business objectives and market awareness, ensuring a focus on providing exceptional digital experiences.
• Oversee multiple initiatives at various development stages, analyzing past enhancements for optimization, and represent customer/stakeholder needs to drive feature development and product integrations, identifying opportunities for testing and enhancements.
• The position may necessitate availability for weekend assignments on occasion.

Qualifications and Competencies Required To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Required Experience:

• Minimum 5 years' experience in enabling digital processes, executing strategic roadmaps, and operating within an agile scrum environment.

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in business, Marketing, Engineering, Communications, or a related field.

Skills Required:

• Analytical and Design Skills: Synthesizes diverse information, generates creative solutions, and uses detailed design processes, leveraging both data and intuition.
• Problem-Solving and Technical Skills: Identifies and resolves problems with skillful analysis, shares expertise, and continuously builds knowledge.
• Communication and Interpersonal Skills: Exhibits clear oral and written communication, maintains confidentiality, and is open to new ideas.
• Leadership and Teamwork: Balances team and individual responsibilities, exhibits leadership, and actively participates in team dynamics.
• Adaptability and Quality Management: Manages change effectively, strives for quality improvement, and adapts to new situations with resilience.
• Professionalism and Business Acumen: Demonstrates professionalism, understands business implications, and aligns work with strategic goals while maintaining ethics and organizational support.

• Overtime required - required on an as needed basis.
• Travel 0-10% - as required on an as needed basis.
• Must have reliable transportation and live within a commutable distance to one of the following cities: Atlanta, GA; Dallas, TX; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Phoenix, AZ.

Qualifications Preferred:

Payments & Servicing Domain Expertise

• 5+ years of Product Owner, Product Management, Business Systems Analysis, or related experience supporting payment processing, loan servicing, receivables, or financial transaction platforms within automotive finance, captive lending, or similar financial services environments strongly preferred.
• Strong understanding of the end-to-end payment lifecycle and supporting business processes, including customer payment intake through paper check, lockbox, ACH, and debit card channels; payment posting; exception handling; returns and reversals; reconciliation; settlement; and audit controls.
• Experience delivering capabilities that improve payment servicing efficiency, operational controls, compliance, and customer experience across payment and servicing functions.

Product & Technical Skills

• Experience leading or supporting the modernization of payments and servicing capabilities through digital transformation initiatives, platform modernization, workflow automation, and enterprise system integrations.
• Proven ability to translate payment servicing workflows, business requirements, and regulatory considerations into product roadmaps, user stories, acceptance criteria, and prioritized backlogs.
• Experience collaborating with Operations, Servicing, Treasury, Finance, Accounting, Risk, Compliance, and Technology stakeholders to deliver scalable solutions in a regulated financial services environment.
• Agile or SAFe Agile experience preferred.

Physical Demands The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

While performing the duties of this Job, the employee is regularly required to sit for long periods of time, use hands and arms to operate office equipment including but not limited to a keyboard, mouse and phone, will occasionally need to reach, stoop, stand or walk. The employee must be able to see (close vision), hear, speak, and communicate verbally. The employee may occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds.

Work Environment The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.

Work Schedule This is a hybrid role. This position requires the ability to work various shifts to accommodate business needs. Typically, between the hours of 8AM-6PM Monday through Friday and on weekends as needed. Travel is required 10% of the time.