Product Owner I

Global Payments Inc. • Kansas City, KS

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Product Owner I serves as the tactical bridge between product strategy and technical execution, translating product vision into clearly defined, deliverable work items. Owns the decomposition of product features into user stories with functional acceptance criteria, business rules, and testable behaviors. Ensures development teams have everything they need to build the right thing, the right way, at the right time. Partners closely with Product Managers, Product Designers, Engineering Leads, and QA to maintain a healthy, prioritized backlog and drive features from definition through release verification. Operates as the day-to-day decision-maker on scope, story sequencing, and functional completeness within the team's delivery workflow.

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 4 years relevant experience
• Experience in business analysis, product ownership, or a similar role within a software product organization
• Direct experience writing user stories, acceptance criteria, and 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 and documentation
• Prior experience collaborating directly with UX or Product Design teams to translate mockups into functional requirements
• CSPO, PSPO, or equivalent Product Owner certification

Responsibilities

• Owns and manages the development team's backlog as the primary working inventory for delivery, including stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, and feature decomposition work.
• Decomposes PM-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 locked functional acceptance criteria, annotated UX, technical review sign-off, and feature flag documentation.
• Serves as the final functional acceptance authority on individual stories, with Product Manager in partnership on major or high-risk features.
• Maintains and prioritizes the team backlog including stories, bugs, tasks, and tech debt in partnership with the Product Manager and Engineering Lead.
• Ensures story order and timing align with committed deadlines, delivery capacity, and cross-team dependencies.
• Presents stories during refinement ceremonies and participates in Monthly Planning, Release Verification, Support Triage, and Backlog Prioritization sessions.
• 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.
• Assists Technical Writing and Learning teams with documentation and user-facing guides as features move toward general availability.

Benefits

• A competitive salary and benefits package that recognizes your contribution
• Opportunities to grow your skills and build your career within a global business
• Access to learning, development and on-the-job experiences that expand your expertise
• A supportive, inclusive team environment where your ideas and input matter
• Time to give back through community and charity initiatives
• A global employee assistance program to support your wellbeing
• Recognition through a global platform that celebrates your achievements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level