Product Owner - Data Products

WestJet Group•Calgary, AB

2d•Onsite

About The Position

The Product Owner – Data Products is responsible for shaping the vision, strategy, and delivery of critical operational data products and their underlying data stores. This role applies product management principles to data, ensuring clear ownership, service expectations, and measurable business outcomes. Acting as a key partner between business stakeholders and technical teams, the role ensures operational data capabilities effectively support business processes, reporting, integrations, and downstream application development. With a strong understanding of data modelling, schema design, and cloud-based technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, and Databricks, the incumbent guides the evolution of operational data products to meet current and future business needs. The role works closely with engineering, architecture, governance, and enablement teams to ensure solutions align with enterprise standards, reference architectures, and reusable patterns while balancing priorities across multiple stakeholder groups.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Economics, Statistics, or a related field.
Minimum of five years of experience, including at least three years as a Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, or in a similar role.
Strong understanding of operational business processes within airline operations or similarly complex operational environments.
Working knowledge of modern cloud-based data technologies and tooling, particularly Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, and Databricks.
Strong technical understanding of data modelling concepts, including relational databases, schema management, normalization, denormalization, and operational data store design.
Understanding of streaming data concepts, ingestion patterns, transformation pipelines, and operational data integration approaches.
Ability to understand the needs of data consumers and translate them into scalable, high-value data products by applying product management principles, defining outcomes, and balancing consumer needs with technical investment.
Ability to guide the direction and evolution of operational data models while partnering closely with engineering teams responsible for implementation.
Ability to collaborate effectively with governance and enablement functions while pragmatically balancing standards with delivery outcomes.
Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and facilitation skills, with the ability to align multiple business and technical teams and translate complex technical concepts into business-oriented decisions.
Strong analytical and outcome-oriented mindset, with the ability to define success metrics and use data to inform prioritization and product decisions.
Strong understanding of data governance principles, including data ownership, metadata management, cataloguing, lineage, and stewardship practices.
Experience working within Agile product delivery environments, including roadmap planning, backlog management, prioritization, and iterative delivery.
Strategic and systems-oriented thinker with a practical, delivery-focused mindset.

Nice To Haves

Agile Product Owner, Scrum Master, or Project Management certification is considered an asset.

Responsibilities

Define and own the vision, roadmap, and strategy for operational data products and underlying data stores, establishing clear consumers, ownership boundaries, service expectations, and success measures.
Define and monitor product success metrics, including data quality, availability, latency, adoption, and downstream business impact, to continuously improve operational data capabilities.
Gather, analyze, and refine business requirements, translating them into product outcomes, roadmap priorities, and backlog decisions while balancing business value, technical sustainability, scalability, and delivery timelines.
Partner with data engineers, architecture, governance, and enablement teams to evolve operational data models and deliver scalable solutions aligned with enterprise standards, reusable patterns, integration principles, and ownership models.
Establish and maintain data contracts, schema evolution practices, and stewardship of operational data entities in partnership with upstream source system owners and downstream consumers.
Define service expectations for data products, including availability, freshness, reliability, and recovery standards, ensuring appropriate levels of quality, consistency, governance, and compliance.
Enable trusted self-service access to operational data and ensure data products are structured to support advanced analytics, machine learning, and emerging AI use cases.