Innovate Consulting is seeking a Product Owner for an insurance company! This position is onsite 5 days a week in either Melbourne, FL.
You will work in a self-contained Value Stream pod that includes assigned development and QA resources, a Delivery Lead, Product Owner, and Value Stream Owner. Some cross-organization initiatives may also include support from a shared Project Manager for coordination across teams. The Value Stream primarily uses Scrum practices with a hybrid delivery approach when needed.
WHAT YOU'LL DO:
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Requirements Gathering: Engage with business stakeholders to capture detailed requirements. Understand the business context, compliance implications, and user impact of every request.
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Story Writing: Translate business requirements into clear, actionable user stories with specific, testable acceptance criteria. Make sure stories include the "what" and "why" so technical teams can determine the "how."
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Backlog Management: Maintain and prioritize the team backlog in Azure DevOps. Make sure stories are groomed, well-defined, and sequenced by business value.
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Technical Collaboration: Partner with Tech Leads during story review to confirm technical completeness. If the Tech Lead identifies architecture implications, flag the story for architecture review.
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Acceptance & Validation: Accept completed work against acceptance criteria (Level 1 validation). For bug fixes that impacted stakeholders, follow up post-deployment for stakeholder confirmation (Level 2). For new external-facing features, compliance changes, and financial calculations, conduct formal UAT with stakeholders (Level 3).
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Compliance Tracking: For compliance-flagged work, confirm filing dates, effective dates, and regulatory deadlines. Build timelines backward from hard deadlines and track throughout the delivery cycle.
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Stakeholder Communication: Provide progress updates, sprint demos, and release communications to business stakeholders. Maintain transparency on delivery status and timeline changes.
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Continuous Improvement: Pursue Product Owner certification if not already held. Attend training to sharpen requirements gathering, story writing, and backlog management skills.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:
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Education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent insurance industry or software product experience.
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Analytical Skills: Strong ability to dig into business processes, ask the right questions, and produce precise requirements.
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Documentation: Excellent written documentation skills. Ability to produce clear, detailed user stories and business requirements documents.
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Communication: Proven ability to engage stakeholders, clarify priorities, and gain alignment across business and technical teams.
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Tools: Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps or similar agile tools for backlog management.
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Insurance Knowledge: Familiarity with insurance operations, products, or technology is strongly preferred.
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Technical Curiosity: Comfortable learning new systems, APIs, and data flows to become the domain expert for your stream.
- CSPO, PSPO, or SAFe Product Owner certification preferred.
ROLE LEVELS:
This role is hired at two levels based on experience and scope:
Sr Product Owner: Owns the full requirements lifecycle for a value stream including stakeholder management, acceptance authority, and mentoring POs.
- Minimum 5+ years in Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Analyst, or similar roles.
- Demonstrated ability to manage complex, multi-stakeholder requirements across regulatory and technical domains.
- Serves as the final quality gate for all stories entering sprints (Definition of Ready authority).
- Mentors and supports Product Owners on story quality, stakeholder engagement, and domain expertise.
- Demonstrated ability to manage cross-Value Stream dependencies, drive release readiness, and support hybrid delivery documentation as needed.
Product Owner: Owns story writing, backlog management, and acceptance for assigned work within a value stream under the Sr PO's guidance.
- Minimum 2+ years in Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Analyst, or similar roles.
- Strong story writing and backlog management skills.
- Works under the Sr PO's guidance on prioritization and stakeholder management.
- Growing into full ownership of the requirements lifecycle. Strong collaboration within the Value Stream and consistent improvement in story quality, acceptance criteria clarity, project requirement details, and stakeholder communication.