The Sr Product Owner works on a cross functional team with a specific focus on Life/Underwriting to create meaningful and simple experiences for their product’s customers. They own the direction-setting, discovery, and prioritization of customer wants and needs. A Sr Product Owner typically has more experience in the role of Product Owner, and as such likely manages complex products with greater scope and impact.

The Sr Product Owner is responsible for articulating and translating the overall vision for the product into strategy and tactics, and for identifying specific solutions in order to drive necessary business outcomes. This highly collaborative role works closely with stakeholders, end users, and functional and technical team members, in order to rapidly deliver quality solutions to customers.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Works as a key team member on a cross functional team, responsible for continuous delivery of value to the customer through compelling and empowering customer experiences
• Collaborate with Product Manager and stakeholders to ensure work prioritization is aligned with Thrivent’s priorities and overall product roadmap as well as to provide product development feedback and direction. Leans into the work of developing and socializing the product strategy with senior leaders across the company.
• Continuously innovates and evolves the product in alignment with strategic priorities. Is responsible for creating, maintaining, and evolving the product roadmap.
• Maintain and refine product backlog: Create user stories and acceptance criteria and prioritize all stories to ensure work focuses on those with maximum business value that align with product strategy.
• Ensure stories clearly communicate the customer and stakeholder needs to meet key business objectives and strategies for the product. Is available for consultation during agile team planning and grooming sessions as needed. Coaches team members on effective product management and agile techniques to help mature the abilities of the entire team.
• Facilitates efforts across other product teams to align product roadmaps and sprint plans, in an effort to focus on delivering the maximum business value to the organization.
• As a functional leader of an agile team, ensures the team is aligned around similar goals and objectives and attending all team meetings
• Engages with customers and users on a regular basis to uncover implicit and explicit needs.
• Develop and track key value drivers that measure effectiveness of product discovery and overall product performance, and communicate these to stakeholders and business leaders on a regular basis.
• Foster a sense of urgency to achieve goals and leverage resources to overcome unexpected obstacles.
• Inspire others to achieve challenging goals and high standards of performance while committing to the organization’s direction (Product/Agile/DevOps)).
• Models Thrivent’s leadership competencies – courage, collaboration, and commitment by demonstrating resiliency, working together to make the best decisions, and holding yourself and others accountable.
• Supports and/or develops an environment in which Thrivent employees and colleagues are focused on continuous improvement, exceptional employee engagement, and an unwavering commitment to our clients. Shapes and/or supports a culture that represents the Thrivent purpose, promise and values, ensuring that Thrivent’s trust and reputation remain strong with its clients.
  

QUALIFICATIONS & SKILLS:

Required:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience.
• 5-7 years relevant business experience.
• Understand fundamentals of iterative development, software development process and procedures.
• Expertise in the principles of Agile Product Management, stakeholder management, market and user research, technology management, and process design.
• High level of organization and attention to detail.
• Passion and understanding of new technology and trends.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and influence skills among all organizational levels; strong facilitation and executive communications skills.

Preferred:

• Certified Product Owner or similar certification.
• Proven success developing business cases, roadmaps, product execution strategies for complex or large-scope products.
• Ability to prioritize work against enterprise, division, and product strategies. Can effectively communicate rationale and impact for prioritization choices.
• Expert in defining high-quality business requirements and proficient in Agile story writing.
• Expertise with foundational product management tools, techniques and principles across discovery, design, build, release, and measure cycle.
• Strong leadership skills to coordinate and motivate product teams, even outside direct reporting relationships.
• Demonstrated experience with user interface design and best practices for usability.
• Experience working in large, complex organizational initiatives.
• Advanced skills in MS Office Suite with particular emphasis on Excel and Powerpoint.

Thrivent provides Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) without regard to race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, national origin, age, disability, marital status, citizenship status, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable local, state, or federal law. This policy applies to all employees and job applicants.

Thrivent is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation, please let us know by sending an email to human.resources@thrivent.com or call 800-847-4836 and request Human Resources.