[Hiring] Product Owner @Collectivus

Role Description

Own delivery for Collectivus’ shared services digital product organization, a cross-functional team of digital, backend and data, enterprise systems, and design functions serving the needs of our retailer customers and internal business users. Core products include websites, mobile apps, email marketing, and enterprise systems. The role sits within the product function and is accountable for delivery outcomes: what ships, when it ships, and whether committed dates hold. Strategy and discovery sit with the Collectivus product manager; this role turns product direction into shipped work and owns the decisions needed to get it there. It works directly with the functional leads to keep the team unblocked, the backlog ready, and the delivery process reliable. This role ensures the team does what it says it will do.

Key Responsibilities

• Own delivery outcomes for the Collectivus digital product team: scope, sequencing, and committed dates.
• Own execution sequencing within the product roadmap, turning product direction into well-defined, ready-to-build work.
• Own sprint commitments and release scope, including go/no-go decisions.
• Own scope trade-offs when delivery is at risk, escalating only when the roadmap itself must change.
• Own the delivery process across functional leads, and change it when it stops working.
• Own delivery health: risks to scope and timeline surfaced and acted on before they become misses.
• Accountable for: Time to market, predictability, cycle time, and defects.

Backlog & Requirements

• Translate the Product Manager's long-term vision and roadmap into an executable product backlog and near-term sprint cycles.
• Transform business, customer, and regulatory requirements into actionable, well-scoped product requirements.
• Write and maintain clear specs and acceptance criteria, acting as the point of clarity for engineering and QA throughout the build.
• Partner with Scrum Master to bring triaged work into backlog and sprint.
• Own backlog sequencing and readiness within the agreed product roadmap.
• Deeply understand Collectivus’ tech stack and make sequencing decisions that consider the system as a whole.
• Ensure work entering development is defined, estimated, and dependency-checked before it starts.
• Keep documentation current so nothing slips between features or teams.

Operational Product Workflows

• Own decision logging so delivery decisions are recorded, traceable, and communicated.
• Participate in and help facilitate Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, backlog refinement, reviews, and retrospectives).
• Coordinate delivery management, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) scheduling, and assignment.

Delivery Leadership

• Run delivery across digital, enterprise systems, backend and data, and design bringing each to clear commitments and holding them to what they committed.
• Surface and resolve cross-team dependencies early.
• Set and defend sprint commitments; protect the team from mid-sprint scope change.
• Make release scope and go/no-go decisions and communicate them clearly to the team and stakeholders.

Delivery Health & Process

• Track delivery health against committed dates and report status on a weekly cadence.
• Flag risks to scope and timelines early, each with a mitigation and a named owner.
• Continuously improve the delivery process; remove steps that do not earn their place.
• Partner with the Collectivus product manager to keep delivery aligned with strategy and discovery output.
• Establish and track delivery metrics, including commitment reliability, backlog readiness, cycle time, release quality, and critical bug aging, to identify opportunities and drive improvements in delivery performance.

Communications & Collaboration

• Serve as the team's primary point of contact for questions on scope, priority, and tradeoffs.
• Communicate roadmap progress, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to cross-functional stakeholders.
• Work directly with scrum master, UX designer, developers, business systems analysts, and engineers day-to-day.

Who You Are

• Take ownership without being asked; makes decisions under ambiguity and stands behind them.
• Direct and decisive across engineering and design; able to challenge scope, negotiate trade-offs, and bring teams to clear commitments.
• Precise and structured in specs, acceptance criteria, documentation, and process.
• Runs many concurrent workstreams without dropping threads; steady under pressure.
• Improves systems rather than maintaining them.
• Builds alignment across functional leads when priorities, constraints, or trade-offs conflict; influences without relying on formal authority.
• 3+ years of digital product ownership, product delivery, or equivalent software product experience, with demonstrated ownership of delivery outcomes.
• Experience running delivery for multi-platform teams.
• Strong working knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodology.
• Comfortable using product, operational, and delivery data to inform prioritization, trade-offs, and delivery decisions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in enterprise software environments.
• CSPO or equivalent Product Owner certification.
• Experience using data and analytics to inform prioritization decisions.
• Background partnering with compliance, legal, or risk stakeholders on product requirements.
• Experience working with digital products at scale and within data-driven product teams.