Lead Digital Product Owner; Customer Experience

Caterpillar Inc.•Peoria, IL

About The Position

As the Lead Product Owner for Shopping Experience within Caterpillar’s Rental platform, you have the strategy and execution of our digital shopping ecosystem, an essential component of the dealer and rental experience. You will drive platform enhancements that improve usability, scalability, and performance, ensuring a seamless shopping journey for dealers and customers across Rental channels. With a strong technical foundation, you will collaborate with engineering, UX, and business teams to deliver solutions aligned with our Rental strategy. Additionally, you will serve as the data steward across multiple systems, maintaining governance and consistency to enable accurate and efficient content delivery. In this role, you will lead initiatives that streamline rental operations and marketing workflows, enhance data consistency across platforms, and optimize how we deliver shopping content to customers. You will work closely with engineering and business partners to scope and execute Cat Rental-related improvement projects, validate platform enhancements, and communicate progress to key stakeholders. You will be responsible for tracking and prioritizing all shopping experience initiatives within Cat Rentals, ensuring that critical and time-sensitive items are addressed while maintaining alignment with committed deliverables. Your work ensures that our shopping ecosystem supports a seamless, scalable, and customer-focused experience for dealers and end-users alike.

Requirements

Business Analysis: Knowledge of business analysis and the set of tasks, techniques and tools required to identify business needs; ability to recommend solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.
Decision Making and Critical Thinking: Knowledge of the decision-making process and associated tools and techniques; ability to accurately analyze situations and reach productive decisions based on informed judgment.
Effective Communications: Understanding of effective communication concepts, tools and techniques; ability to effectively transmit, receive, and accurately interpret ideas, information, and needs through the application of appropriate communication behaviors.
Software Problem Management: Knowledge of strategies, practices and tools for resolving software problems; ability to manage software problems in installed software products.
Software Product Business Knowledge: Knowledge of and experience with the business aspects and operation of a software product; ability to manage install base, current uses, future plans, and product vision.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Knowledge of UAT activities, tasks, tools and techniques; ability to design, implement and evaluate acceptance tests for end-users.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, marketing, communications, engineering, or a related field preferred
Proven experience in digital product management with a focus on eCommerce or shopping experiences.
Extensive experience in digital product management, including ownership of customer-facing web platforms.
Proven ability to collaborate across marketing, engineering, UX, and business teams to align shopping and CMS capabilities with strategic goals.
Ability to define and prioritize shopping-related initiatives, ensuring timely delivery and alignment with business priorities and dealer needs.
Strong understanding of website design principles, including UX/UI best practices, responsive design, and accessibility standards to optimize the CRS shopping experience.
Ability to lead initiatives that streamline marketing operations and improve data consistency across platforms supporting browsing, search, PDPs, quoting, and checkout.
Proven experience in product content creation focused on digital experiences
Expertise in content lifecycle management, including taxonomy, metadata, and workflow automation to support product discoverability and conversion.
Hands-on experience with CMS platforms (e.g., Adobe Experience Manager) and their integration into shopping workflows.
Excellent oral and written communication skills with the ability to tailor messaging for engineering teams, business partners, and leadership.
Strong stakeholder management and communication skills to navigate complex or sensitive situations.
Working knowledge of PIM systems and how they integrate with CMS to enable unified, accurate product content in the Cat Rental shopping experience.
Proficiency with Microsoft tools (Word, Excel, Teams, PowerPoint) and Azure DevOps for planning, backlog management, and release tracking.
Product Owner certification (e.g., CSPO, SAFe PO/PM) or strong knowledge of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).

Responsibilities

Define and drive the product vision and roadmap for the Cat Rental Shopping Experience, ensuring capabilities across browse, search, product detail, quoting, and checkout are cohesive and customer‑centric.
Aligning shopping initiatives with enterprise content governance models and Caterpillar’s digital transformation goals, ensuring seamless interplay between shopping, content, and data.
Own and prioritize the shopping product backlog (including CMS dependencies), aligning work with business outcomes, dealer needs, compliance requirements, and platform constraints.
Own the Cat Rental website design direction for shopping—partnering with UX/UI to establish and evolve design systems, information architecture, and page templates that improve findability, clarity, accessibility, and conversion across web and mobile.
Lead cross‑functional collaboration with engineering, UX, content, analytics, and dealer stakeholders to deliver scalable, high‑quality shopping solutions.
Configure and maintain shopping data and content in the CMS to ensure accurate dealer–product relationships, availability, and visibility throughout the Cat Rental experience.
Own the end‑to‑end strategy for AEM‑backed shopping content, including upper‑funnel marketing content that drives SEO, discoverability, and conversion into the rental shopping flow.
Identify and resolve data inconsistencies and system issues that impact product discovery, pricing/availability accuracy, checkout reliability, or overall user experience.
Support dealer onboarding to the Cat Rental shopping ecosystem with tooling, workflows, and best‑practice guidance for content and catalog maintenance.
Design and approve content/workflow templates and metadata structures that optimize shopping performance, personalization, and operational efficiency.
Capture feedback from functional teams (sales, marketing, dealer ops, support) and translate it into prioritized features and improvements that meet business objectives.
Serve as subject matter expert (SME) for Cat Rental shopping and CMS, guiding technical discovery/design and training marketing partners and dealers on best practices.
Define, derive, and analyze KPIs for shopping journeys and CMS publishing efficiency (e.g., search CTR, PDP conversion, quote submission rate, page performance, content freshness).
Partner with Business Analysts to convert business requirements into actionable specs (scope, layout, data contracts, acceptance criteria) for shopping features and integrations.
Work closely with development teams to track delivery, conduct validation/UAT, and ensure each release maximizes value and meets quality, accessibility, and performance standards.
Continuously manage the product backlog, reprioritizing enhancements based on evolving business needs, dealer readiness, and time‑sensitive events (e.g., Summit/CONEXPO).
Lead change management for dealer digital initiatives—training, documentation, communications, and stakeholder engagement to ensure smooth adoption of shopping capabilities.