Product Owner I

Global Payments Inc.•Jeffersonville, IN

About The Position

Serves as the tactical bridge between product strategy and technical execution, translating product vision into clearly defined, deliverable work items. Owns and manages the development team’s backlog as the primary working inventory for delivery, ensuring stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, and feature work are clearly understood, prioritized, refined, and ready for execution. Partners closely with Product Managers, Product Designers, Engineering Leads, QA, Release Management, and other stakeholders to reduce churn and waste, remove blockers, and drive features from definition through release verification. Operates as the day-to-day decision-maker on story-level scope, backlog sequencing, functional completeness, and delivery readiness within the team’s workflow, while aligning to product strategy and roadmap direction set by Product Management.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree
Relevant experience or degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field; combination of relevant training and/or experience in lieu of degree
Typically minimum 6-8 years relevant experience
Experience in business analysis, product ownership, product delivery, or a similar role within a software product organization
Direct experience owning or managing a development team backlog, writing user stories, defining acceptance criteria, and creating functional specifications

Nice To Haves

Experience working in an Agile delivery environment such as Scrum or Kanban with hands-on backlog management responsibilities
Experience in payments, POS, or fintech product domains
Experience with Jira and Confluence for backlog management, workflow tracking, and documentation
Prior experience collaborating directly with UX or Product Design teams to translate mockups, interaction flows, and user experience requirements into functional delivery requirements
Experience partnering with engineering teams on technical review, estimation, sequencing, dependency management, release readiness, and defect triage
CSPO, PSPO, or equivalent Product Owner certification

Responsibilities

Owns and manages the development team’s backlog, including stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, support-driven work, and feature decomposition work. Ensures the backlog is healthy, current, prioritized, and aligned with Product Manager priorities, committed deadlines, delivery capacity, and cross-team dependencies.
Champions and supports the product development team by reducing churn and waste, removing blockers, and ensuring work is sufficiently defined before entering development.
Decomposes Product Manager-defined Features into individual user stories, ensuring complete coverage of approved scope across child work items. Authors story-level functional acceptance criteria including observable behaviors, boundary logic, conditional variants, UX copy, field validations, and error states that are specific, testable, and unambiguous.
Partners with Development Leads on high-level story mapping, backlog sequencing, and execution planning to align delivery with release timelines, capacity, and dependencies.
Collaborates with Product Designers to embed high-fidelity UX specifications, annotated mockups, and interaction behaviors into story acceptance criteria. Ensures design intent is fully captured at the story level so engineering teams can execute without ambiguity.
Partners with Engineering throughout technical review, architecture validation, and estimation, incorporating technical feedback before stories enter development.
Owns and enforces the team Definition of Ready, validating that every story entering a development pod has clear functional acceptance criteria, required UX context, technical review input, dependency awareness, and applicable feature flag documentation.
Serves as the final functional acceptance authority on individual stories, with Product Manager partnership on major, high-risk, or strategically significant features.
Drives story refinement and delivery readiness ceremonies by presenting stories, clarifying expected behavior, resolving open questions, and ensuring the team understands business rules and functional outcomes.
Participates in Monthly Planning, Release Verification, Support Triage, and Backlog Prioritization sessions to keep delivery execution aligned with product priorities and operational needs.
Manages feature flag lifecycle at the story level, including documentation of flag states, creation of cleanup tickets after release, and coordination with Release Management on staged rollout configurations.
Supports observability and monitoring requirements for high-risk features by partnering with Engineering to define success metrics and alerting thresholds where applicable.
Collaborates with other Product Owners across teams when features span multiple domains, ensuring consistent scope coverage, dependency alignment, and synchronized delivery timelines.
Coordinates with QA, Release Management, Technical Writing, Learning, Support, and other stakeholders as needed to support release readiness, documentation, training, and adoption.
Continuously improves team delivery practices by identifying process gaps, proposing workflow enhancements, and maintaining clear documentation for repeatable execution.