Product Owner (Agile) Contract-to-Hire (Conversion Opportunity)
Location: Remote, must be located and authorized to work in the United States Position Type: Contract-to-hire (targeting conversion within 9 months). Compensation: This role offers $65-$80/hour during the contract phase, with a planned transition to a full-time salary of $103,000-$150,000 annually. We are actively seeking candidates interested in both immediate contract engagement and long-term career growth with our team. Travel and/or in-office presence may be required at times. Generous benefit package including travel benefits and retirement. THE POSITION The Agile Product Owner is responsible for one or more Agile teams maximizing value delivery within each Program Increment (PI). The Agile Product Owner is focused on translating a product vision into an actionable backlog and ensuring that the agile development team delivers high-quality, business-relevant features. This tactical role within the Agile delivery team is responsible for defining user stories, prioritizing the backlog, and ensuring the development team delivers value in alignment with the product vision and stakeholder needs. The Agile Product Owner plays a pivotal role in Scrum teams, serving as the "voice of the customer" and ensuring solutions evolve to meet changing business needs. The role is responsible for the following results:
- Responsible for product delivery, including regular enhancements and major new capabilities.
- Engages with sponsors, business leaders, and end users to translate high-level product vision and business requirements into actionable user stories and acceptance criteria.
- Owns and refines product backlog, ensures well-defined, prioritized user stories, ready for development.
- Maintains enhancement request process, capability of roadmaps and deployment schedules.
- Communicate priorities, trade-offs, and progress to stakeholders.
- Accept or reject completed stories per acceptance criteria and quality standards.
- Actively participates in sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives, providing clarifications and accepting/rejecting deliverables.
- Focuses on delivering incremental value through frequent releases, ensuring alignment with strategic direction.
- Makes day-to-day decisions on feature scope, priorities, and trade-offs during the development cycle.
- Coordinates with training, and business leaders for successful rollouts and adoption.
REQUIRED SKILLS
- Deep understanding of user-centric design.
- Strong business analysis and process mapping capabilities and capacity to balance strategic vision with detailed execution.
- Excellent project management skills.
- Excellent communication skills to bridge technical and business domains.
- Proficiency in product management frame works Agile methodologies and Scrum practices.
- Solution packaging and deployment (managed/unmanaged solutions).
- ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) (e.g., using Azure DevOps).
- Release management and rollback strategies.
EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years working as a Product Owner in Agile environments
- Experience working with cross-functional teams (engineering, QA, UX, DevOps)
- Product Owner Certification; SAFe Product Owner Certification preferred
- PDLC
- Out Systems
- MS 365 (including MS Dynamics, Copilot)
- ServiceNow
- Azure Dev Ops
EDUCATION The preferred candidate will hold a bachelor's degree in a related field; or three to five years' related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience. THE DEPARTMENT The following teams make up the Technology department: Business Analysis and Quality Assurance, Applications Development, Applications Support, Enterprise Value Delivery and Engineering. The group identifies and develops technological strategies that support GVI's business goals and objectives to ensure internal and external partners are provided with stable systems. These include: all desktop, network, phone and email systems, applications (reservations and operations systems), websites, and Internet access.