Associate Product Owner - Market Solutions (Open to hiring at Product Owner level)

Wellmark, Inc. • Des Moines, IA

19h • Hybrid

About The Position

At Wellmark, we’re transforming how we deliver value through agile product teams, bringing smarter, faster, and more customer-focused solutions to life. This is an opportunity to play a key role in shaping products that directly impact our customers, teams, and business outcomes. You’ll be empowered to influence priorities, drive outcomes, and grow your impact within a collaborative, purpose-driven organization.

As an Associate Product Owner or Product Owner in our Market Solutions area, you will play a critical role in maximizing the value delivered by your agile team. You’ll serve as the voice of the customer, translating business needs into a clear product vision, prioritized backlog, and actionable work for the team. You will also partner closely with stakeholders and cross-functional teams to define, refine, and deliver high-value features, ensuring alignment to strategic priorities and customer outcomes. You’ll lead backlog prioritization, contribute to roadmap planning, and guide work through the full product lifecycle, from concept through delivery and iteration. Through strong collaboration, continuous feedback, and a focus on measurable outcomes, you’ll help ensure your team consistently delivers meaningful value.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or direct and applicable work experience.
• Minimum 3+ years’ experience in a combination of: Proven project management experience including managing project scope and schedule, utilizing industry standard project management methodologies.
• Eliciting detailed business requirements.
• Experience in a change management capacity aligned to an industry standard methodology.
• Exposure to the development and execution of user acceptance test plans, scenarios, and cases utilizing industry standard testing methodologies.
• Wellmark business acumen for specific product or division of this role.
• Demonstrates ownership and commitment to projects; drives tasks and milestones toward successful completion and holds themselves accountable for project performance.
• SAFe agile certification (e.g., Product Owner) obtained within 3 months.
• Possess or is willing to pursue certified Product Owner Certification.
• Experience successfully leading others through change.
• Demonstrated facilitation and influencing skills to drive decision making among stakeholders with diverse perspectives and priorities.
• Ability to work well in a team environment and be capable of building and maintaining relationships with other team members, departments, and customers.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex information in a condensed manner to various stakeholders verbally and in writing to achieve shared vision and goals.
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to identify risks and deploy appropriate mitigation strategies to meet stakeholder/functional requirements.
• Strong group facilitation skills and presentation skills demonstrated through successful experience.
• Consulting skills required with, excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills.
• Proficient in Microsoft Office suite.
• Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) knowledge.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's degree.
• Prior experience in a Product Owner role operating within a SAFe organization, including demonstrated experience with agile and/or lean product management competencies of value measurement, optimization, and eliminating waste.
• Experience with agile business analysis, including documentation of features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Exposure to negotiation skills and techniques.
• Experience using agile requirements management tools (e.g., Jira or Azure DevOps).

Responsibilities

• Maximize the value of the product and the work of the agile team by working with the team to ensure that they have a clear vision of the priority and value of the work.
• Act as a strong, informal, dotted-line leader and mentor to the agile team through effective two-way communication, helping employees learn new skills, identifying and managing resistance, and being an advocate.
• Serve as the voice of the customer by creating a shared understanding of the product vision and customer needs through consistent communications with the team.
• Active leader in the agile team’s scrum events, including agile ceremonies such as stand-ups, story refinements, backlog grooming, and team retrospectives.
• Lead iteration review meetings to demonstrate the outcomes achieved to the product team’s stakeholders or customers.
• Ensure the team understands the product priorities and executes the highest value work through lean and agile product prioritization methods (e.g, WSJF, MoSCoW).
• Obtain insights, prioritize, and balance multiple stakeholder priorities, and synthesize complex information, to maintain product team alignment with the vision.
• Partner with stakeholders and customers to curate the product vision, product stack, and features to ensure that the next increment of value is executed.
• Author the product roadmap features by creating well-defined product requirements, including features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Partner with stakeholders to assess value and prioritize features and stories to ensure work focuses on those with a maximum value aligned to the product strategy.
• Manage against and participate in the refinement of Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s) defined for the product team during each planning interval.
• Evaluate progress at the end of each iteration, including the ability to define Minimum Viable Products (MVP).
• Seek quantitative and qualitative information to comprehensively understand where the product team’s solutions are not optimizing value.
• Apply change management practices and tools in pre-planning and planning (features and user stories) to ensure impacted stakeholders and employees are prepared and equipped to adopt changes; consult with the Change Practitioner supporting Agile Release Train (ART) to monitor change readiness and adoption across the ART.
• Understand the impact the assigned product has on the customer and work collaboratively to ensure any change is properly managed.
• Obtain objective insights through research and analytics to analyze how a customer of the product is adopting, consuming, and benefiting from the product features.
• Other duties as assigned.

Benefits

• unique benefit offerings

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: Associate degree