Associate Product Owner - AI Platform Team

Wellmark•Des Moines, IA

About The Position

The Product Owner for the Artificial Intelligence Platform team is responsible for maximizing the value of enterprise AI platform capabilities and domain-aligned AI solutions delivered by the agile team. This role partners closely with engineering, architecture, analytics, security, legal/compliance, and product stakeholders to define, prioritize, and deliver governed, reusable AI capabilities that enable safe, scalable, and efficient AI adoption across the enterprise. This team’s work spans foundational AI platform capabilities and enterprise AI solution delivery. That includes helping shape reusable platform services, standards, templates, and guardrails, while also driving delivery of enterprise domain-aligned AI capabilities that can be leveraged across multiple product teams, business lines, and channels. Success in this role requires balancing business value, technical feasibility, platform reuse, and enterprise requirements for privacy, security, compliance, reliability, and consistency. The ideal candidate is a natural problem solver with strong technical acumen who can work effectively across business and technology teams to translate complex needs into clear product direction, prioritize high-value outcomes, and guide delivery of scalable AI capabilities for enterprise use. This role will help drive alignment across federated teams, influence platform and solution strategy, and partner with stakeholders to accelerate AI adoption through reusable, governed, enterprise-ready solutions.

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

Experience supporting or leading product work for AI/ML, Generative AI, platform, or developer platform capabilities in an enterprise environment, including translating customer, client, member, and stakeholder needs into product direction and measurable outcomes.
Strong familiarity with AWS services and cloud architecture, especially for secure, scalable, platform-based solution delivery.
Strong analytics background with the ability to define meaningful measures of success, evaluate solution performance, and support benchmarking of AI capabilities.
Knowledge of non-functional requirements and system performance considerations such as latency, throughput, scale, elasticity, resiliency, reliability, currency, and load characteristics.
Experience working with a variety of data stores, data types, and integration patterns used in enterprise solution delivery.
Demonstrated understanding of LLMs, machine learning models, Generative AI capabilities, evaluation concepts, and common implementation patterns such as prompt-based solutions, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows.
Experience with observability, monitoring, and operational health for enterprise-grade technology solutions, ideally including AI or data-intensive systems.
Experience working in a regulated environment and delivering solutions involving secure user data, privacy controls, compliance expectations, and sensitive/PII data considerations.
Ability to partner effectively with engineering, architecture, analytics, security, legal/compliance, and product stakeholders to define reusable capabilities, platform standards, enterprise-ready design patterns, and high-value delivery priorities.
Prior experience in a Product Owner role operating within a SAFe and/or agile organization, including backlog prioritization, value measurement, optimization, feature and user story definition, acceptance criteria development, and experience using agile requirements management tools such as Jira or Azure DevOps.
Strong executive presence and written/verbal communication, influence, consensus-building, and negotiation skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex product and technical concepts across business and technology audiences.
Demonstrated critical thinking, structured problem solving, attention to detail, and continuous improvement skills, including the ability to assess tradeoffs, identify issues, and drive effective solutions in complex environments.
Flexible and adaptable to change, with the ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams and independently organize and prioritize work based on value.

Responsibilities

Maximize the product's value and the work of the agile team by working with them to ensure 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.