Product Owner

National Student Clearinghouse•Herndon, VA

3d•$90,000 - $115,000•Remote

About The Position

By joining the National Student Clearinghouse, you can be sure that the work you do now will help shape the future of education and the workforce in the U.S. As the trusted source for higher education data since 1993, the Clearinghouse is the leading provider of transcript and data exchange services, automated enrollment and degree verifications, learner insights and research, and compliance solutions for schools, businesses, and learners nationwide. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Clearinghouse works with nearly 3,600 postsecondary institutions to meet their compliance needs and with thousands of high schools and districts to provide continuing collegiate enrollment, progression, and completion statistics about their alumni. In addition, the Research Center publications inform policymakers and business leaders about student educational pathways. Using our unique combination of data, analytics, and software to drive our mission, security and privacy is paramount. Join us as we continue to invest in our talent and new advanced technologies to unlock the power of data on behalf of all learners. About the Role: The Specialist III, Product Owner plays a pivotal role in translating customer and business objectives into actionable technology requirements. In this position, you will research, communicate, negotiate, and document both business and technical requirements. Youll work independently and collaborate with subject matter experts to gather and analyze data, document findings, define requirements, and provide support throughout the product lifecycleincluding development, testing, training, implementation, and ongoing system maintenance. As a standing leader within agile scrum teams, you will manage and support multiple initiatives simultaneously. Youll employ creative, innovative approaches to data collection, analysis, research, design, documentation, and go-to-market strategies to inform product decisions. Your experience spans diverse product roles, including SaaS and web-based solutions, enabling you to coach junior team members and provide cross-functional support as needed. The ideal candidate understands the critical importance of documenting interconnections, integrations, and dependencies across products, technologies, processes, and systems. You proactively seek ways to enhance system flexibility while minimizing reliance on technical resources and future maintenance. Highly organized and process-driven, you continuously work to improve existing systems. Technically adept, you can perform analysis, gather intelligence, and build simple queries to check logs, aggregate data, and deliver actionable insights. Currently, this is a remote-first position, and this position may be required to periodically work on-site at our office and the frequency would depend on the department/division's requirements. Therefore, candidates must either reside within a reasonable distance to commute to our office or be willing to travel to our office in Herndon, when required.

Requirements

Bachelors degree in technology, business, or related field. A combination of education and experience, including through military service, will also be considered.
5 years of related experience in soliciting and defining requirements for mission critical business applications.
Experience with: Agile Methodology as a Product Owner or Business Analyst.
Embedding quality controls in work processes to assure uninterrupted operation.
Analyzing data for composing targeted and concise requirements and translating strategic and tactical goals.
Demonstrated ability to: Exemplify strong collaboration.
Solicit, define, and write business requirements from research, customer, market, and internal feedback to translate into user stories.
Have product knowledge and its impact to other product(s).
Identify tradeoffs in decisions and drive resolution of challenges across the organization.
Model solutions for a business process.
Demonstrated proficiency: Working with Agile principles, processes, driving decision making, and aligning the team/organization on goals and objectives.
Communicating and negotiating effectively and confidently with internal stakeholders from all levels of the organization, and external stakeholders to represent the product, department, and company.
Managing and prioritizing multiple initiatives to ensure successful, timely completion and issue-resolution.
Working with Microsoft Office Suite, and/or other collaboration tools.
Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication, and effective presentation skills.
Demonstrates the Clearinghouses core competencies: customer focus, optimizes work processes, communicates effectively, collaborates, and is open and authentic.
Must live within a commutable distance to Herndon, VA or in one of the Clearinghouse's approved States for hiring purposes. Refer to our HR Policies Page, located on our Careers site at https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/careers/human-resource-policies/ , for more details.
Must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.
We do not intend to sponsor external applicants for work visas, and may consider sponsorship only if no qualified candidates can be found who are authorized to work without sponsorship.
Must be at least 18 years old.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge of Clearinghouse services and applications.
Knowledge of education related data standards, such as IMS Comprehensive Learner Record or Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) or other industry-based or government-based data exchange standards.
Experience with: Software development management tools (Rally, JIRA, Confluence).
CRM and enterprise tools.
Performing complex data analysis using analytic tools and database queries.
Master's degree or PhD in technology, business, or related field or additional combination of advanced education and experience, including through military service.
Education Solutions and PDP Project: Working knowledge of higher education institution processes & experience with SIS vendor solutions
Expertise in Data exchange such as REST-XML-EDI.

Responsibilities

Demonstrate the Clearinghouse's core competencies: Customer Focus, Optimizes Work Processes, Collaborates, Communicates Effectively, and Be Open and Authentic Within Customer Focus, this competency includes data literacy skills to build customer-centric solutions. This role must understand the business purpose of data, including how it is being used for a particular service and across the enterprise, how data is modeled, defined, validated, captured, cleansed, stored, reported, visualized and accessed. This role will leverage that data knowledge to write business requirements, process flows, and user stories that accurately reflect enterprise data and provide additional data insights for education and business stakeholders.
Work closely with the Business Owner/Product Manager to understand the needs of the market/industry and define the scope for initiatives.
Lead efforts to solicit, review, document, and refine requirements via interviews, workshops, group meetings, and/or existing systems documentation or procedures.
Prioritize the backlog, including refinement and preparation (all stories business, enablers, and technical).
Maintain a backlog to have a minimum of 2-3 sprints worth of groomed work.
Contribute to the successful on-time, within-budget and in-scope delivery of business initiatives.
Define and develop user stories, wireframes, sequence diagrams, and data flow diagrams.
Produce As Is and To Be process flow diagrams.
Derive business requirements from use cases in an Agile environment.
Create, revise, validate, and maintain business flow maps, business requirements, business rules, user stories, user flows, etc.
Analyze the impact of new business requirements/user stories on the current application from both a business and technical perspective.
Collaborate with the Scrum Master and Scrum Team to determine estimated delivery dates, dependencies, team velocity, challenges, quality assurance, user acceptance and overall performance of teams.
Collaborate with Product Managers and other business owners to identify all cross-system interfaces and build out the requirements.
Accurately represent the needs of the business owner(s) to scrum teams and vice versa.
Participate in various Agile ceremonies.
Understand and effectively communicate to scrum teams and business owners all the data elements utilized by the service and understand their service details and processes
Create and foster positive and open communication channels between external and internal stakeholders.
Foster a culture of collaboration, teamwork, innovation, and service excellence at the Clearinghouse and help resolve any product or project issues.
Position may be required to perform other duties as required. These essential functions are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these essential functions.

Benefits

The National Student Clearinghouse provides a robust benefit program designed to help meet the needs of each employee and their family, both now and in the future.
We offer comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance, as well as life and disability insurance benefits, for employees and their qualified dependents.
Health care, dependent care, and limited purpose flexible spending accounts, as well as a health savings account with annual employer contributions of $300 for employees and $600 for employees who are enrolled with their spouse and/or dependents, voluntary supplemental health plans for Accident and Hospital Indemnity coverage, and infertility coverage are options available for employees to set aside pre-taxed dollars for certain qualifying expenses.
We offer a very generous 401k matching contribution program with the opportunity to defer pre-tax and Roth contributions, as well as catch-up contributions for those who are eligible!
We are proud to offer a competitive paid leave program consisting of vacation, sick, and personal time, as well as paid holidays, up to 3 weeks of paid parental leave during a 12-month period , and up to 5 days of paid military leave per calendar year .
Vacation time will accrue based on length of service, and new full-time hires can accrue up to 13 days of vacation and up to 10 days of sick time per year.
On an annual basis, new employees may use up to 32 hours of accrued sick time as personal time.
Additionally, the Clearinghouse observes at least 15 paid holidays per year, including company year-end close between Christmas and New Years Holidays.
Another perk is that employees have the option to get reimbursed for basic wholesale company and roadside assistance memberships (e.g., Costco and AAA) and to request a buy back on portions of unused accrued vacation based on tenure and certain other qualifications.
Employees can further their education and professional development by using our Employee Education Assistance Program, which establishes reimbursement for qualified education expenses upon successful completion of the program, and leveraging the enterprise-wide LinkedIn Learning subscription.
There are additional employee benefits too, including but not limited to, mental health with up to eight free therapy sessions for employees and their family members and well-being reward benefits.
With the Clearinghouse being an eligible 501(3)(c) nonprofit organization, employees are eligible for service credit towards the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF).