Technical Product Owner

Ascend Learning, LLC•Leawood, OR

5d•Remote

About The Position

Ascend Learning, a leading healthcare and learning technology company, is the connection between a powerful portfolio of brands serving students, educators, and employers with outcomes-based, data-driven solutions across the lifecycle of learning. From testing to certification, Ascend Learning products are used by physicians, emergency medical professionals, nurses, allied health professionals, certified personal trainers, financial advisors, skilled trades professionals and insurance brokers. Headquartered in Burlington, MA, with additional office locations and hybrid and remote workers in cities across the U.S., Ascend Learning was recognized by Newsweek and Plant-A Insights Group as one of America’s 2025 Greatest Workplaces as well as America’s Best Places to work for Mental Well-Being for 2025. We're always looking for talented, passionate professionals to join us in our mission to help change lives. If this sounds like an environment where you'd thrive, read on to learn more.  The Technical Product Owner (TPO) is the voice of the product and singular role driving business requirements into agile teams. This role is required to serve as a key conduit between business/product objectives and technical execution. The purpose of the TPO role is to enable effective and efficient execution of technical product development with a clear understanding of the desired end product to meet customer needs, based on well-defined user stories.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in related fields, such as Business Administration, Information Technology, Computer Science or other areas combined with relevant work experience
Experience working in an agile environment is strongly preferred
Minimum of 3+ years of combined experience in a combination of project management, consulting, Agile development or information technology (project management alone is insufficient)
Experience working in a dynamic environment, with need to adapt to changing priorities, market dynamics, and evolving business needs and guide teams accordingly
An exceptional communicator and collaborator, adept at working across different functions and diverse cultures
Ability to successfully translate business requirements into features and user stories, and manage/ prioritize a feature backlog
Effective communicator and collaborator able to breakdown complex business problems into logical and deliverable work that can easily tie back to business themes and priorities
Ability to ensure that the vision for 'how a product needs to perform for a customer' is embodied in the design of the product, including for technical specifications
In-depth understanding of Agile methodology (tools, processes, roles)
Ability to understand minimum viable product requirements and prioritize

Responsibilities

Understand market needs and transform business requirements into features and user stories with clear acceptance criteria to convey specific functionality from an end-user perspective.
Engage with Technical Product Managers and business product owner as needed to gather and understand customer needs and requirements, incorporating feedback into the backlog.
Prioritize and manage backlogs, maintaining a well-prioritized list of features and user stories; use feedback from user engagement to adapt/modify requirements, features, prioritization of features, and product performance.
Modify/change product features and requirements in response to new information on markets/customers from Product Managers.
Conduct work prioritization and work sequencing and manage sprints and development of new features / products. Continuously map back to integrated roadmap milestones to ensure alignment on delivery
Track and manage product development to ensure alignment with established product requirements and market / user feedback
Support development teams in grooming the backlog during sprint planning by clarifying user stories and setting priorities.
Oversee performance against success criteria, including customer perspective and UAT/OT.
Drive alignment through effective and consistent communication
Deliver consistent and clear release notes
Support and drive documentation that supports both the delivery of capabilities that meet customer needs and enable training and implementation of capabilities
Articulate risk and mitigations early and often
Drive decision making on tradeoffs through clear understanding of business need, technical options and viable options