Product Owner

The Opportunity

Huron helps its clients drive growth, enhance performance and sustain leadership in the markets they serve. We collaborate with education organizations to develop strategies and implement solutions that enable the transformative change our clients need to own their future. Together, we empower clients to drive innovation, create sustainable funding streams and deliver better student outcomes.

Today, leaders of higher education institutions and academic medical centers are spending too much time reacting to market forces, rather than focusing on the essential priorities that help students, faculty and staff thrive. The most productive path forward requires an intentional approach and innovative thinking, whereby stakeholders across the entire institution rally around a shared vision and embrace the hard work of effecting change.

You'll help our clients to achieve organizational effectiveness, improve student outcomes, implement new technologies and align resources and investments to ensure long-term sustainability.

Join our team as the expert you are now and create your future.

Position Summary

While Product Managers set the big-picture goals and strategy for their product success, Product Owners act as a bridge to connect the product and development teams. As a Product Owner, you add value by prioritizing the right work, at the right times, and make sure everyone on the team is aligned on the reasoning behind that work to ensure the continuous delivery of value to our users.

As a PO, you are the person who facilitates product decisions and have the final say about short term product development priorities with the development team. You understand stakeholders' needs and build a vision that will drive the development team to develop the vision. A Product Owner needs to have an all-inclusive view of the product along with all the other factors like business understanding, go-to-market, organizational readiness, and product capabilities. All of these should be collectively managed, coordinated and aligned to drive product success

Responsibilities:

This position is specifically responsible for the Reporting and Analytics features of the Huron Research Suite application. The Product Owner has the following responsibilities:

Concept/Roadmap

• Reviews and contributes to the program vision, roadmap, and content presentations
• Works with Product Manager & Data Architect to learn about what problems they are aiming to solve with the product, what customer needs or desires have informed their product strategy, and what the team will view as product success.
• Translates the Product Manager & Data Architect's vision and product use cases into specific work items for development.
• Manages enhancement request backlog including reviewing, commenting, and prioritizing for future releases.
• Ensures bugs are appropriately classified and prioritized for release.

Sprints

• Breaks broader features into user stories and prioritizes initiatives from the Product Manager & Data Architect, factoring in time, importance, and value.
• Refines backlog and prepares for upcoming sprints.
• Works with the team to understand dependencies, bugs, and any outstanding questions which may impact the ability to proceed with development.
• Participates in regular standups.
• Represents the needs of many different stakeholders when making key decisions.
• Serves as a triage resource between the development team and product management to answer questions in the most efficient manner possible.
• Works with the team to agree on accepted completion of stories and features.
• Leads system demonstrations with the development team, highlighting new features to stakeholders and gathering feedback.
• Acts as a liaison for business stakeholders and end-users, determining whether each story meets their shared expectations and that feature completion meets their definition of done.
• Participates in release management, including reviews of release overview documents, release notes, and help text.
• Identifies inefficiencies in the development process and - in coordination with the Engineering Manager - creates new processes to ensure development work is completed on-time and in tight coordination with other application development teams.

Customer Interactions

• Visits customers and attends industry events on an as-needed basis; synthesizes knowledge gained through attendance into user stories for future product improvements.
• Assists during internal Product Advisory Committee (PAC) meetings, Customer Community Meetings, and conference Working Group sessions.

Required:

• U.S. work authorization is required.
• BS / BA degree or equivalent work experience.
• Familiarity with data pipelines and reporting architecture for software applications, including integration points like APIs.
• Understanding of SQL logic and how SQL statements are formulated and executed.
• Familiarity with data modeling principles and database design (e.g. dimensional modeling, data normalization vs. de-normalization, join keys and table relationships etc.).
• Experience working with analytics and visualization software like AWS QuickSight, Power BI or Tableau, either via creating visualizations directly or specifying visualization requirements to developers.
• Knowledge of key concepts and processes within the Software Development Life Cycle, including Agile development practices and microservices technologies.
• Experience creating repeatable Agile software development processes and standards, like work item templates and SOPs.
• Communicates well with a wide range of audiences (technical and non-technical, staff and managerial), and in a wide range of settings (e.g., one-on-one, small group, in person, conference calls and via email).
• Demonstrates an empathy for users and passion to deliver high quality solutions that they love.
• Excellent interpersonal skills; highly invested in developing strong relationships both with customers and colleagues.
• Strong communication and organization skills.
• Deeply curious; willing to learn both technical details to better work with developers and business details to understand the vision for the product.
• A self-starter; works quickly and independently with minimal day-to-day direction.
• Able to multi-task effectively in a fast-paced environment and reprioritize and meet deadlines as new tasks arise.
• Able to collaborate with team members across multiple time zones, including both US zones and Indian Standard Time.
• This position can be Full Time remote.

Preferred:

• Experience in 1+ programming languages, like Python or Bash scripting.
• Familiarity with the purposes and functions of Amazon Web Services (AWS) data pipeline tooling - like Redshift, S3, RDS, Glue and Lambda - or with other data pipeline vendors like Snowflake.
• Experience with or understanding of research administration workflows, including grants and agreements management and compliance management.
• Experience working with or implementing research administration solutions (Huron's Click applications, InfoEd, Cayuse, COEUS, or the like).
• Experience with Azure Dev Ops.
• 2-3 years of experience working as a Product Owner, Lead Data Engineer, Engineering Manager, Technical Business Analyst or equivalent.

The estimated base salary for this job is $95,000 - 130,000. The range represents a good faith estimate of the range that Huron reasonably expects to pay for this job at the time of the job posting. The actual salary paid to an individual will vary based on multiple factors, including but not limited to specific skills or certifications, years of experience, market changes, and required travel. This job is also eligible to participate in Huron's annual incentive compensation program, which reflects Huron's pay for performance philosophy. Inclusive of annual incentive compensation opportunity, the total estimated compensation range for this job is $106,400 - $153,400. The job is also eligible to participate in Huron's benefit plans which include medical, dental and vision coverage and other wellness programs. The salary range information provided is in accordance with applicable state and local laws regarding salary transparency that are currently in effect and may be implemented in the future