Product Owner

State of Maryland • Baltimore City, MD

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

Maryland Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) is building a new social insurance system to provide paid time off for medical and family reasons to 2.6 million workers and 180,000 employers in Maryland. The Digital Services team is responsible for creating, launching, and continuously improving this digitally native, public-facing service with a human-centered approach. This role focuses on applying product management and services design principles to deliver digital services within a government context. The Product Owner will champion user experiences across all system components, prioritizing and delivering outcomes for external (employers, workers) or internal (FAMLI staff) audiences. This is a remote position, with occasional travel to the FAMLI office in downtown Baltimore and throughout Maryland for collaboration.

FAMLI's Values:
Equity & Accessibility: Building a service for all Maryland workers, families, and employers, advocating for their needs and inclusion.
Adaptability: Pivoting and iterating based on feedback and learnings in a new team and process environment.
Accountability: Being accountable to Marylanders, partner agencies, and team members through clear communication, goal setting, and process optimization.
Empathy: Understanding others' feelings, situations, and points of view, and fostering strong relationships and mutual understanding within the team.

Requirements

• 5 or more years of experience in product management.
• Managing cross-functional teams in a remote-first environment.
• Working collaboratively with key stakeholders (e.g., internal teams, subject matter experts, policy) to understand product requirements.
• Working iteratively with users of digital products to define, build, improve, and maintain those products.
• Making effective digital product trade-off decisions that balance feasibility, user needs, value, and time.
• Demonstrated knowledge of modern digital product delivery practices, including continuous delivery and user research.

Nice To Haves

• A keen interest in the challenges of public-sector service design.
• Experience building alignment with stakeholders.
• Experience with human-centered design.
• Experience collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams to translate a product vision into a backlog and lead the team through smooth and continuous delivery.
• Experience with agile software development.
• A history of having generated creative ideas to complex problems and followed through on the implementation of solutions.
• An ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders, cross-functional teams, and across business lines.
• Knowledge of paid family and medical leave programs, policies, and users.
• Knowledge of Salesforce, especially Public Sector Solutions and/or Benefits Management.
• Knowledge of Call Centers.
• Knowledge of Program-level data reporting and analytics.
• Knowledge of Knowledge management tools.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for the end-to-end user experience for their assigned user type (e.g., employers, workers, FAMLI staff) and/or journey.
• Coordinating work teams using an agile approach.
• Playing a key role in service delivery vision, prioritization, backlog, and acceptance criteria.
• Closely monitoring, facilitating, and influencing vendor product leadership and activities.
• Encouraging consistent user experience across workstreams and channels (including self-service support, in-call support, written material, etc.).
• Continuously reviewing user and business needs, refining priorities, outlining milestones and deliverables, and identifying opportunities and risks for their user type.
• Setting high-level priorities for a workstream.
• Working closely with delivery teams to ensure the right work is getting into each sprint.
• Helping to build a cohesive team culture of alignment, trust, empowerment, and collective investment in product success.
• Building trust and developing a comprehensive understanding of the needs of FAMLI's users and stakeholders.

Benefits

• Flexible hours and hybrid teleworking
• Paid holidays (12-13 per year)
• Generous paid leave package (annual, sick, personal and compensatory leave)
• State Pension ("defined benefit" plan)
• Tax-deferred supplemental retirement savings plan (401(k) and 457)
• Comprehensive, subsidized health, dental and prescription plans with little to no deductibles, free generic prescriptions, and free preventative health services
• Flexible Spending Account plans for Health Care and Daycare
• State Employee Credit Union

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed