Lead Product Owner

CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen)•Milwaukee, WI

About The Position

CLA is growing and seeking to hire an experienced Lead Product Owner to join our talented Information Technology team. The position offers growth, flexibility and a collaborative work environment. This role drives strategic product outcomes through full-stack ownership in an Agile environment, integrating business, user, and technical priorities to deliver measurable value aligned with CLA’s business objectives. This role optimizes the value stream, streamlining processes to deliver measurable customer outcomes. It demands hands-on leadership across discovery, requirements, delivery, and optimization, while mentoring teams and fostering a data-driven, user-focused culture. Collaborates with architecture, engineering, UX, and business stakeholders to ensure technical feasibility, scalability, and compliance, balancing short-term wins with long-term vision.

Requirements

6 years of relevant experience required.
Bachelor's degree is required. Combination of relevant experience, education, and training may be accepted in lieu of degree.

Nice To Haves

Supervisory experience preferred
Degrees Information Technology, Business Administration, or related field is preferred.

Responsibilities

Validate user problems, operational pain points, and strategic opportunities using qualitative and quantitative inputs, ensuring alignment with business outcomes.
Partner with product leader, business, engineering, architecture, and data leaders to shape the roadmap, identify cross-team impacts, and understand enterprise dependencies.
Convert research insights into structured hypotheses, refined problem statements, and actionable backlog items with confirmed feasibility and measurable business value.
Translate user insights and production feedback into iterative improvements through coordination with UX, engineering, and QA.
Develop product requirements documents (PRDs) and requirements that cover functional and non-functional needs, including scalability, security, data integrity, accessibility (ADA/WCAG), and operational constraints.
Break down complex initiatives into epics, features, and stories with clear acceptance criteria, technical dependencies, and alignment to the Definition of Ready.
Drive prioritization using value-based frameworks (MoSCoW, Value-Effort analysis, RICE), incorporating ROI, risk, technical debt, architectural readiness, and business urgency.
Define success metrics for adoption, viability, efficiency, and business value, and integrate insights back into backlog refinement and roadmap evolution.
Lead full-stack delivery from Alpha through GA (general availability), ensuring that solutions meet business objectives, quality thresholds, and operational readiness.
Partner with engineering and QA to verify technical feasibility, compliance, reliability, and environment readiness across the full release path.
Lead Agile execution through planning, iteration delivery, retrospectives, and coordination with Release Train Engineers, Scrum Masters, and program/project managers.
Surface and resolve blockers, manage cross-team dependencies, and align delivery teams to maintain predictable progress and measurable value.
Work with engineers and architects to ensure feasibility across data schemas, automation workflows, APIs, integration patterns, and enterprise architecture standards.
Evaluate technical tradeoffs between speed, complexity, long-term maintainability, and architectural runway requirements.
Prioritize technical enablers necessary for scale, reliability, resiliency, and operational excellence across the product portfolio.
Ensure solutions meet expectations for security, auditability, compliance, and performance at enterprise scale.
Align business owners, product partners, engineering leaders, and delivery teams on priorities, tradeoffs, and cross-functional decisions.
Use data, customer insights, and impact analysis to secure agreement on roadmap direction and investment sequencing.
Convert stakeholder and user feedback into actionable product work tied to measurable business results.
Communicate progress, risks, and decisions clearly to leadership and cross-functional teams to maintain sustained alignment.
Mentor Product Owners in advanced requirements development, backlog strategy, stakeholder management, and outcome-oriented delivery.
Elevate product management capabilities through coaching, framing techniques, structured decision practices, and operational discipline.
Model systems thinking, enterprise awareness, and high-quality product judgment, setting the standard for senior-level product practice.
Evaluate product performance against defined KPIs, using insights to guide prioritization, roadmap evolution, and investment decisions.
Identify and address adoption, workflow, or performance gaps, driving targeted improvements tied to business impact.
Lead ongoing post-launch optimization through structured learning cycles and continuous improvement practices.