Technical Product Owner
Dallas, Texas
This role will work closely with brand Operations, business partners, IT team members and vendor partners. The Technical Product Owner will possess a proven background in planning, prioritizing, and delivering complex technical software solutions in concert with engineering and design counterparts.
Your Key Job Functions
• Define and prioritize product roadmaps in collaboration with product management.
• Partner with stakeholders and other product teams to gather top-level scope and requirements.
• Be a collaborative connection between Operations, Marketing, Development, and Engineering teams to ensure a transparent and productive workflow environment.
• Anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make trade-offs, and balance the business needs versus technical constraints.
• Identify key decision points for escalation and maintain decision logs.
• Work with business and technical stakeholders to develop and document user stories.
• Participate in sprint planning to determine the team’s objectives for the upcoming sprint.
• Prioritize and maintain the product backlog.
• Participate in agile ceremonies such as stand-ups, story refinements, and team retrospectives; ensure the team has a clear understanding of priorities and next steps.
• Lead the sprint review meeting to present the output from the sprint to key stakeholders.
• Analyze feedback from sprint reviews, and other data such as end user feedback and operational metrics, to identify and understand product needs.
• Work with the development team to create acceptance criteria and definitions of failures and done.
• Lead multiple IT, Marketing, Operations and external vendor teams on roadmaps, backlog items, priority and preferred timing.
• Formally document and communicate high-level roadmaps, detailed backlog and story requirements to multiple IT, Marketing, Operations and external vendor teams on a regular cadence for alignment and approval.
• Provide leadership through all phases of the SDLC: requirements gathering, design sessions, coding, code reviews/unit testing, test support/UAT and deployment planning and execution, including resolution of post-production issues.
• Identify and orchestrate tasks and timelines for all contributing teams (vendor teams, development, restaurant technology, enterprise data, enterprise services, restaurant training, and corporate communications) to meet the product’s solution-delivery schedule.
• Where necessary, gather the technical level of effort and estimated costs from all participating teams and manage spend of approved budget.
• Maintain a relationship with the IT Service Desk and Guest Engagement managers and team – updating the team regularly on upcoming releases, new functionality, bugs and FAQs.
• Provide leadership to the development teams: communicating sprint goals and tactical objectives, making key decisions, removing all obstacles to successful product/project delivery and providing performance feedback.
• Proactively provide regular updates to stakeholders and leadership teams.
What You Bring to the Team
• BS/BA degree or Information Systems, Computer Science or related field preferred, or equivalent formal training or work experience.
• Minimum of 4-6 years of experience in a technical leadership role, leading projects or development teams.
• Ability to read and author system diagrams and technical documents.
• Strong SDLC experience.
• Customer centric; listening, understanding and responding to customer needs while being committed to the customer first philosophy, including both internal and external customers.
• Highly self-motivated to accomplish team goals in a fast paced environment.
• Exceptional prioritization skills: you know how to organize execution and sell the prioritization decisions.
• Proven written and verbal communication skills.
• Excellent problem-solving skills.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills - demonstrated ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences including those at senior leadership levels.
• Exhibit the ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome unforeseen obstacles to achieve desired results.
• Knowledge of agile planning tools (e.g. JIRA, Confluence) preferred.
• Hospitality or Retail experience a plus.
• BA/BS or equivalent in experience, skills and training.