[Hiring] Senior Product Owner @Thrivent

Role Description

The Sr Product Owner works on a cross functional team to create meaningful and simple experiences for their product’s customers. They own the direction-setting, discovery, and prioritization of customer wants and needs. A Sr Product Owner typically has more experience in the role of Product Owner, and as such likely manages complex products with greater scope and impact.

The Sr. Product Owner role is highly collaborative working closely with several key partners. The Sr Product Owner articulates, translates, and executes the Product Manager’s long-term strategy and vision of the product through tactical strategies and solutions to drive necessary business outcomes. This requires the right alignment and regular, transparent communication to ensure both roles deliver on their goals.

Additionally, the Sr. Product Owner works closely with stakeholders, end users, and functional and technical team members to rapidly deliver quality solutions to customers.

This role is part of Thrivent's Enterprise Data Products organization and supports data products aligned to Product & Services and Life, Health & Annuities (LHA). This data product enables product performance insights, business decision-making, analytics, and AI-enabled business capabilities. The Sr Product Owner partners closely with business leaders, analysts, architects, and engineering teams to define, prioritize, and deliver data products that drive measurable business outcomes.

Enterprise Data Products at Thrivent are focused on creating trusted, reusable, and measurable data products that enable analytics, operational decision-making, governance, and AI-powered experiences across the enterprise.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Works as a key team member on a cross functional team, responsible for continuous delivery of value to the customer through compelling and empowering customer experiences.
• Collaborate with Product Manager and stakeholders to ensure work prioritization is aligned with Thrivent’s priorities and overall product roadmap as well as to provide product development feedback and direction.
• Leans into the work of developing and socializing the product strategy with senior leaders across the company.
• Continuously innovates and evolves the product in alignment with strategic priorities. Is responsible for creating, maintaining, and evolving the product roadmap.
• Maintain and refine product backlog: Create user stories and acceptance criteria and prioritize all stories to ensure work focuses on those with maximum business value that align with product strategy.
• Ensure stories clearly communicate the customer and stakeholder needs to meet key business objectives and strategies for the product. Is available for consultation during agile team planning and grooming sessions as needed.
• Coaches team members on effective product management and agile techniques to help mature the abilities of the entire team.
• Facilitates efforts across other product teams to align product roadmaps and sprint plans, in an effort to focus on delivering the maximum business value to the organization.
• As a functional leader of an agile team, ensures the team is aligned around similar goals and objectives and attending all team meetings.
• Engages with customers and users on a regular basis to uncover implicit and explicit needs.
• Develop and track key value drivers that measure effectiveness of product discovery and overall product performance, and communicate these to stakeholders and business leaders on a regular basis.
• Foster a sense of urgency to achieve goals and leverage resources to overcome unexpected obstacles.
• Inspire others to achieve challenging goals and high standards of performance while committing to the organization’s direction (Product/Agile/DevOps).
• Models Thrivent’s leadership competencies – courage, collaboration, and commitment by demonstrating resiliency, working together to make the best decisions, and holding yourself and others accountable.
• Supports and/or develops an environment in which Thrivent employees and colleagues are focused on continuous improvement, exceptional employee engagement, and an unwavering commitment to our clients.
• Shapes and/or supports a culture that represents the Thrivent purpose, promise and values, ensuring that Thrivent’s trust and reputation remain strong with its clients.
• No direct personnel supervisory responsibility, however, supervises large complex product teams with cross-functional team members.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience.
• 5-7 years relevant business experience.
• Experience working with enterprise data products, analytics, reporting, governance, or data platform initiatives within financial services or other highly regulated industries.
• Demonstrated ability to define and measure product value through business outcomes, adoption, quality, operational efficiency, or customer impact.
• Experience partnering with business leaders, data engineers, architects, analysts, and technical delivery teams.
• Understand fundamentals of iterative development, software development process and procedures.
• Expertise in the principles of Agile Product Management, stakeholder management, market and user research, technology management, and process design.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and influence skills among all organizational levels; strong facilitation and executive communications skills.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, translate business problems into actionable product priorities, and facilitate alignment across multiple stakeholder groups.
• Strong prioritization and tradeoff-management skills across competing stakeholder needs.
• Ability to influence without direct authority across business and technology teams.

Requirements

• Certified Product Owner or similar certification.
• Experience with modern data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, Power BI, or similar technologies.
• Experience with data governance, metadata management, data quality, lineage, or master data management.
• Experience developing and managing enterprise data products that support analytics, customer insights, operational reporting, decision support, or AI-enabled capabilities.
• Financial services experience, preferably supporting life insurance, health insurance, annuities, product management, distribution, or advisor capabilities.
• Expert in defining high-quality business requirements and proficient in Agile story writing.
• Expertise with foundational product management tools, techniques and principles across discovery, design, build, release, and measure cycle.
• Strong leadership skills to coordinate and motivate product teams, even outside direct reporting relationships.
• Experience working in large, complex organizational initiatives.

Benefits

• Various bonuses (including, for example, annual or long-term incentives).
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Health savings account.
• Flexible spending account.
• 401k.
• Pension.
• Life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance.
• Disability insurance.
• Supplemental protection insurance.
• 20 days of Paid Time Off each year.
• Sick and Safe Time.
• 10 paid company holidays.
• Volunteer Time Off.
• Paid parental leave.
• EAP.
• Well-being benefits, and other employee benefits.