Product Owner, MPact AI

Tom McLeod Software Corporation•Birmingham, AL

About The Position

The Product Owner, MPact AI is responsible for the product direction, development priorities, and ongoing performance of McLeod Software’s RespondAI and Rate products. The role serves as product owner and directly manages assigned staff, aligning customer and business needs with AI and Rate Intelligence software development activities. It translates product goals into actionable requirements, guides delivery across teams, and ensures RespondAI capabilities meet expectations for quality, usability, reliability, and business value. The Product Owner defines and maintains product vision, roadmaps, and priorities; gathers customer feedback and business requirements; and observes customer workflows to identify product opportunities and reduce adoption friction. The position owns the backlog and translates product goals into user stories, requirements, and acceptance criteria, including data needs, expected model behavior, evaluation, and monitoring. It makes scope and priority decisions within established authority, reviews completed work, coordinates release readiness, and participates in Agile/Scrum ceremonies. The role partners with customer-facing teams on release communication, documentation, training, adoption, and product issues. It guides development and maintenance of machine learning models, natural language processing capabilities, and data extraction pipelines; reviews technical approaches with technical leads; and oversees the use of SQL and structured and unstructured data for analysis and product improvement. It also establishes product success measures and partners with technical teams on offline evaluations, shadow testing, and controlled experiments, including A/B testing where appropriate.

Requirements

At least 9 years of experience as a Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, and/or in a leadership position focused on software product delivery; alternatively, a bachelor’s degree with at least 5 years of such experience.
Experience owning software product roadmaps, prioritizing backlogs, and translating business needs into product requirements.
Working knowledge of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Understanding of data pipelines, model deployment, evaluation, and monitoring.
Knowledge of software development, APIs, and system integrations.
Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite.

Nice To Haves

Experience delivering software products within Agile/Scrum frameworks.
Transportation and logistics experience.
Experience working with structured and unstructured data.

Responsibilities

Define and maintain the RespondAI and Rate/RatePro product vision, roadmap, and priorities in alignment with company objectives and leadership direction.
Gather and evaluate customer feedback, business requirements, and product usage insights to identify opportunities, clarify problems, and prioritize enhancements.
Visit customer sites to observe workflows, evaluate product fit, identify opportunities for features and products, and reduce adoption friction.
Own and prioritize the product backlog while balancing customer value, technical dependencies, development capacity, model quality, and maintenance needs.
Translate product goals into user stories, requirements, and acceptance criteria, including data needs, expected model behavior, evaluation criteria, and monitoring requirements.
Make product scope and priority decisions within established authority, communicate trade-offs, and escalate decisions requiring leadership approval.
Review completed work against acceptance criteria and accept backlog items; coordinate release readiness with teams responsible for technical quality and deployment.
Participate as product owner in sprint planning, backlog refinement, reviews, and retrospectives; support stand-ups and resolution of delivery obstacles as needed.
Partner with customer-facing teams on release communication, documentation, training, adoption, and resolution of product issues.
Guide development and maintenance of machine learning models, natural language processing capabilities, and data extraction pipelines supporting RespondAI.
Review technical approaches and design documentation with technical leads to ensure decisions address business requirements, data quality, performance, scalability, and maintainability.
Oversee the use of SQL and structured and unstructured data for analysis, feature development, model evaluation, and product improvements.
Establish product success measures and partner with technical teams to implement offline evaluations, shadow testing, and controlled experiments, including A/B testing where appropriate.
Directly manage assigned staff.