Tech Product Owner III - Site Reliability Engineering

Medica•Minnetonka, MN

10d•$88,800 - $152,300•Hybrid

About The Position

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) is the tactical owner of a team’s backlog and capacity. While the Technical Product Manager (TPM) sets strategic direction at the capability level, the TPO ensures the team delivers the highest-value work in alignment with capability priorities. Acting as the single-threaded owner of the team backlog, the TPO bridges business, technology, and delivery execution, consolidating responsibilities traditionally split between a Product Owner and Scrum Master. The TPO champions Medica’s Delivery Framework (MD) by fostering transparency, enabling disciplined delivery, and ensuring predictable flow of work. They shield the team from external disruptions, maintain clarity on priorities, and ensure commitments align with proven capacity. On the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, the TPO is accountable for maximizing the value, reliability, and long‑term sustainability of Medica’s reliability, observability, performance, and operational resilience capabilities. This includes balancing run‑the‑business reliability work with strategic investments that reduce operational risk and improve service stability. The SRE TPO applies a strong product mindset focused on solving problems, enabling business outcomes, and ensuring durable systems through: Deep understanding of user and operational needs, Rapid validation and feedback loops, Relentless focus on value over output, Consistent, high‑quality experiences—especially during incidents or degradation events.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in related field
5+ years of product related work experience beyond degree
Product thinking and problem‑solving orientation
Analytical and systems thinking
Strong communication, negotiation, and stakeholder alignment skills
Servant leadership and collaboration

Nice To Haves

Experience working with SRE, platform, infrastructure, or DevOps teams
Familiarity with reliability engineering concepts such as observability, incident management, performance, and resilience.
Experience balancing short‑term operational demands with long‑term platform health

Responsibilities

Translate prioritized capability epics (from TPM ) into clear backlog items (features, user stories, technical enablers)
Define acceptance criteria in partnership with the Technical Lead (TL), explicitly addressing reliability, scalability, performance, security, and operability and ensure backlog items are “ready” for development
Maintain a healthy prioritized backlog sequenced based on value, risk, and dependencies
Reject or escalate any “backdoor” requests that bypass MDF intake
Serve as a primary proxy for SRE customers and users, including application teams, platform teams, and operations partners
Explore user workflows, operational pain points, and reliability risks to inform backlog priorities
Ensure backlog items clearly articulate customer impact and operational value
Partner with the Delivery Leader to ensure backlog aligns to actual team capacity
Account for interrupt-driven work such as incidents, on-call responsibilities, and operational load
Respect and enforce Work in Progress (WIP) limits so the team is never overcommitted
Actively remove work when urgent items are added per EDC governance
Represent the team during prioritization sessions and ensure EAC and EDC decisions are reflected in the backlog
Ensure RTB (Run-the-Business) items, enhancements, and strategic initiatives are prioritized together within the backlog
Lead backlog refinement, sprint planning, and iteration reviews
Ensure team goals tie back to capability outcomes and enterprise priorities
Lead all Scrum Master activities, including facilitating ceremonies and promoting disciplined delivery and continuous improvement
Partner with the Technical Lead (TL) on delivery—the TPO owns the “what/why,” at the feature level while the TL owns the “how"
Make trade-off decisions daily if necessary to keep delivery aligned with priorities
Coordinate dependencies with other teams and escalate blockers or capacity issues to EDC
Act as a point of contact for business and technical stakeholders
Provide transparency into progress, risks, and delivery metrics
Ensure feedback loops with TPM, business users are fast and continuous to validate outcomes early
Capture learnings from retrospectives and post-incident reviews, incorporate them into future sprints
Ensure incident learnings and observability insights feed directly back into backlog prioritization
Track delivery and flow metrics: say/do ratio, cycle time, throughput
Validate delivered stories/features against acceptance criteria and business outcomes
Report progress and risks to TPM, Delivery Leader, and stakeholders
Translate capability-level priorities into backlog items; align roadmap to team execution
Balance team capacity, enforce WIP, and escalate systemic issues
Validate backlog items against reliability, operational and business outcomes and secure timely feedback
Ensure enterprise prioritization decisions are executed accurately at the team level