Technical Product Owner

Information System
Dallas, TX
October 9, 2024

Job Summary

This role will work closely with brand Operations, business partners, IT team members and vendor partners. The Technical Product Owner will possess a proven background in planning, prioritizing, and delivering complex technical software solutions in concert with engineering and design counterparts.

Your Key Job Functions

• Define and prioritize product roadmaps in collaboration with product management.
• Partner with stakeholders and other product teams to gather top-level scope and requirements.
• Be a collaborative connection between Operations, Marketing, Development, and Engineering teams to ensure a transparent and productive workflow environment.
• Anticipate bottlenecks, provide escalation management, anticipate and make trade-offs, and balance the business needs versus technical constraints.
• Identify key decision points for escalation and maintain decision logs.
• Work with business and technical stakeholders to develop and document user stories.
• Participate in sprint planning to determine the team?s objectives for the upcoming sprint.
• Prioritize and maintain the product backlog.
• Participate in agile ceremonies such as stand-ups, story refinements, and team retrospectives; ensure the team has a clear understanding of priorities and next steps.
• Lead the sprint review meeting to present the output from the sprint to key stakeholders.
• Analyze feedback from sprint reviews, and other data such as end user feedback and operational metrics, to identify and understand product needs.
• Work with the development team to create acceptance criteria and definitions of failures and done.
• Lead multiple IT, Marketing, Operations and external vendor teams on roadmaps, backlog items, priority and preferred timing.
• Formally document and communicate high-level roadmaps, detailed backlog and story requirements to multiple IT, Marketing, Operations and external vendor teams on a regular cadence for alignment and approval.
• Provide leadership through all phases of the SDLC: requirements gathering, design sessions, coding, code reviews/unit testing, test support/UAT and deployment planning and execution, including resolution of post-production issues.
• Identify and orchestrate tasks and timelines for all contributing teams (vendor teams, development, restaurant technology, enterprise data, enterprise services, restaurant training, and corporate communications) to meet the product?s solution-delivery schedule.
• Where necessary, gather the technical level of effort and estimated costs from all participating teams and manage spend of approved budget.
• Maintain a relationship with the IT Service Desk and Guest Engagement managers and team ? updating the team regularly on upcoming releases, new functionality, bugs and FAQs.
• Provide leadership to the development teams: communicating sprint goals and tactical objectives, making key decisions, removing all obstacles to successful product/project delivery and providing performance feedback.
• Proactively provide regular updates to stakeholders and leadership teams.

What You Bring to the Team

• BS/BA degree or Information Systems, Computer Science or related field preferred, or equivalent formal training or work experience.
• Minimum of 4-6 years of experience in a technical leadership role, leading projects or development teams.
• Ability to read and author system diagrams and technical documents.
• Strong SDLC experience.
• Customer centric; listening, understanding and responding to customer needs while being committed to the customer first philosophy, including both internal and external customers.
• Highly self-motivated to accomplish team goals in a fast paced environment.
• Exceptional prioritization skills: you know how to organize execution and sell the prioritization decisions.
• Proven written and verbal communication skills.
• Excellent problem-solving skills.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills - demonstrated ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences including those at senior leadership levels.
• Exhibit the ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome unforeseen obstacles to achieve desired results.
• Knowledge of agile planning tools (e.g. JIRA, Confluence) preferred.
• Hospitality or Retail experience a plus.
• Education/Training
• BA/BS or equivalent in experience, skills and training.