Senior Product Owner

CliftonLarsonAllen•Charlotte, NC

About The Position

CLA is seeking a Senior Product Owner to drive business value through end-to-end ownership of a complete product or significant product area, from discovery and delivery through post-launch optimization. The role combines outcome-focused strategy, continuous discovery, delivery execution, operational sustainability, technical depth, and accountability. The Senior Product Owner partners with product leadership on vision and strategy while owning execution within the assigned product area. They use business and technical fluency to balance short-term goals with the long-term vision and connect stakeholders, technical teams, and users to deliver measurable outcomes in an Agile environment. The position requires less than 10% travel. CLA offers comprehensive benefit options to support employees’ physical, financial, social, and emotional well-being.

Requirements

Four years of relevant experience required.
Bachelor’s degree required; a combination of relevant experience, education, and training may be accepted in place of a degree.
Systems thinking and the ability to integrate business, technical, and user requirements across enterprise systems.
Technical fluency in software engineering, APIs, data integration, and enterprise architecture.
Experience using prioritization frameworks such as MoSCoW, Value-Effort, RICE, or Kano.
Knowledge of user-centered design principles, Design Thinking, and user research.
Strong analytical skills, including the ability to use qualitative and quantitative data to guide decisions and evaluate product performance.
Experience leading discovery and delivery through Agile practices such as Scrum, Lean, or SAFe.
Ability to align cross-functional teams and deliver complex integrations with measurable outcomes.

Nice To Haves

Degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field preferred.
Certified Scrum Product Owner or SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager certification preferred.

Responsibilities

Partner with product leadership and business stakeholders to shape the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the assigned product area.
Lead qualitative and quantitative research to validate user problems and identify opportunities within the defined scope.
Translate discovery insights into hypotheses and actionable backlog items with confirmed feasibility and alignment to desired outcomes.
Communicate priorities, findings, and progress to maintain stakeholder alignment.
Develop product requirements documents, process flows, and prototypes that define user needs, business goals, and functional and non-functional requirements.
Own and prioritize the backlog using methods such as MoSCoW, Value-Effort analysis, and RICE.
Balance time to market, scalability, technical debt, and stakeholder priorities.
Translate product vision into epics, features, and user stories with clear acceptance criteria, dependencies, and compliance considerations.
Gather feedback and behavioral data to refine backlog items and ensure they meet the Definition of Ready and Definition of Done.
Coordinate with product leadership on cross-team risks and dependencies.
Collaborate with engineering and architecture teams to ensure requirements translate into viable technical solutions aligned with platform patterns.
Evaluate technical tradeoffs and provide input on scalability, extensibility, auditability, and integration approaches.
Anticipate downstream needs, including data structures, validation logic, audit trails, and reusable components.
Own delivery execution for the assigned product area, from validated requirements through production release and post-launch enhancements.
Facilitate Agile ceremonies, including PI Planning, sprint planning, demonstrations, and retrospectives.
Define delivery milestones and success criteria with Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineers, and program or project managers.
Monitor progress, remove impediments, and ensure delivery aligns with objectives and key results, quality standards, and timelines.
Serve as the primary product interface for business owners, technology partners, end users, and delivery teams.
Manage conflicting priorities using structured rationale, data insights, and outcome-focused communication.
Communicate progress, risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs transparently, escalating concerns when necessary.
Promote agility, experimentation, continuous learning, and systems thinking throughout the product area.
Define and analyze product performance against key performance indicators to identify opportunities for improvement.
Prioritize improvements to user experience, workflow quality, system performance, and business outcomes.
Drive post-launch enhancements using continuous learning to inform the product roadmap and operational processes.