Product Owner - NBS

Nelnet•Lincoln, NE

8d•$85,000 - $90,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Product Owner coordinates product development, release planning, and manages the overall successful delivery of new and existing products. This position supports the reporting and analytics products within a student information system — including embedded Power BI reports, district and school dashboards, and self-service report-building tools used by K-12 administrators and educators. The Product Owner works closely with school and district users to understand the questions they need answered and translates those needs into data-driven product solutions.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
1+ years related experience or existing product knowledge.
Experience with business intelligence or reporting tools — Microsoft Power BI strongly preferred (building reports, understanding data models, basic DAX or Power Query).
Ability to prioritize and manage multiple concurrent projects.
Flexibility to adapt quickly to new requirements, situations, programs, and services.
Understanding of data visualization best practices and the ability to design reports that clearly answer a user's question.
Comfort working with data — understanding data elements, relationships, calculations, and quality/validation concepts — without needing to be a developer.
Ability to turn loosely defined questions ("How are my students doing?") into specific, measurable requirements.
Ability to communicate effectively with both technical audiences (developers, data engineers) and non-technical audiences (school and district users).
Strong attention to detail, particularly in validating that numbers are accurate and consistent.
Analytical thinking: Forms a hypothesis, tests it against the data, and knows when the data supports a conclusion and when it doesn't.
Data storytelling: Designs reports and insights that answer the user's question and point to an action, not just display numbers.
Strong customer focus.
Ability to be a team player.
Good time management and organizational skills.
Strong written and oral communication skills.
Strong problem-solving skills.
Demonstrated respect, collaboration, and pride in ownership.
Ability to adapt to change.
Focus on delivering value.

Nice To Haves

Experience with K-12 education data or student information systems preferred.
Ability to read and write basic SQL queries, or comparable experience exploring and validating data, preferred.

Responsibilities

Works very closely with agile development teams to create use cases, requirements, and estimates in support of company objectives.
Serves as a liaison between school and district users (administrators, data coordinators, and educators) and the development team — understanding the decisions they need to make and translating reporting and analytics needs into actionable requirements and user stories.
Defines and maintains clear metric and data definitions (e.g., attendance rates, grade distributions, enrollment and demographic measures) so that reports are consistent, accurate, and trusted across products.
Collaborates with development and data teams on the underlying data model — including source data views, relationships, calculations, and data quality — to ensure reports reflect the student information system accurately.
Manages the lifecycle of the standard report and dashboard catalog, including prioritizing new reports, coordinating releases and updates to customers, and retiring outdated content.
Shapes the self-service reporting experience, including how users build, save, share, and find reports, and how roles and permissions control access to student data.
Ensures reporting solutions respect student data privacy requirements (e.g., FERPA) and appropriate data access boundaries between districts, schools, and user roles.
Uses product usage analytics (report views, favorites, active users) to understand adoption, measure value, and inform prioritization.
Spends a significant amount of time validating report mockups, prototypes, and early-stage dashboards with clients.
Works with sales, technical sales, marketing and product manager to provide content for sales, user training and documentation tools.
Ensures client documentation is updated and effective including release notes, report definitions, and roadmaps.
Works with clients directly and manages a client feedback tool to ensure voice of the customer is heard and felt in each product.