Lead Product Owner

Caterpillar Inc.•Chicago, IL

2d•$128,470 - $208,770•Onsite

About The Position

Are you an experienced, strategic, and highly organized product leader who excels at bringing structure and clarity to complex environments? Do you have a background in aligning teams, scaling product operations, and strengthening how teams work together? Are you passionate about leading teams to consistently deliver customer centric digital products with quality and focus? If so, this Lead Product Owner role on the Cat Central team could be the next step in your career. This role is focused on product operations, cross‑team communication, defining ways of working, and leading the roadmap for critical areas across Cat Central’s digital ecosystem. We are looking for a strong Product Owner to drive operational rigor, strengthen execution across several scrum teams, and enable seamless digital onboarding experiences for our global customers. You’ll have the opportunity to directly influence product quality, team effectiveness, and overall customer adoption of Cat Central, Caterpillar’s mobile-first tool to make owning and effectively operating our best-in-class equipment easier than ever. We have aggressive goals, and a strong and fast-growing team to hit them. This role will play a critical part in our success as a product team.

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.
Software Change Request Management: Knowledge of software change request management; ability to manage software product change requests from customers, prospective customers, vendors, and internal staff.
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

3+ years working with agile teams in Product Owner, Product Manager, or related roles
5+ years in digital product, operations, or transformation roles
Proven experience leading multiple agile teams (2–4+ scrum teams) or a product “pod” operating at scale
Strong track record of operational leadership, including defining ways of working, improving team effectiveness, and driving consistency across delivery teams
Demonstrated ability to influence and align senior stakeholders across a matrixed organization, including Product Management, Engineering, UX, and business partners
Experience leading teams in development of high-volume mobile apps
Experience improving user onboarding or adoption journeys
Systems thinking and interest in product operations

Responsibilities

Lead inter-team and stakeholder communication, cross-product dependency tracking, and collaboration with shared services across Cat Digital
Collaborate with a product “pod” of 2–3 Slovakia-based scrum teams, each with their own embedded Product Owners, ensuring alignment to product vision, roadmap priorities, and customer outcomes
Drive day‑to‑day decisions on backlog priorities, sequencing, and trade‑offs, ensuring clarity for engineering, UX, and partner teams
Facilitate and continuously improve team ceremonies including standups, roadmap planning, team retrospectives, epic creation, and backlog refinement
Define, document, and evolve ways of working across teams to ensure consistent execution, transparency, and operational excellence
Own and maintain a roadmap focused on improving customer and dealer onboarding, authentication journeys, and core adoption experiences within Cat Central
Partner with Data & Analytics to identify and take action on insights, measure onboarding performance, and articulate success criteria/KPIs
Translate strategy, business requirements, and customer needs into clear, actionable epics and features