Product Lead

Purpose of Position

The Product Lead is the IT-side owner of delivery-ready product execution for their assigned domain. Embedded within engineering teams and partnering daily with the Delivery Lead, this role bridges business intent and delivery execution – ensuring that what teams build is well-defined, well-refined, and aligned to the value the Product Manager has articulated.

Tasks and Responsibilities

• Own backlog management for assigned delivery teams within the scope of approved epics, sequencing and maintaining a healthy pipeline of ready work
• Make tactical prioritization decisions about story ordering, dependency sequencing, and sprint content in partnership with the Delivery Lead and engineering teams
• Balance competing demands within the backlog – features, enhancements, technical debt, and production support – to maximize value delivery
• Communicate backlog priorities and rationale to delivery teams, ensuring engineers understand not just what they are building but why
• Receive epic-level handoffs from the Product Manager and own decomposition into well-formed user stories and tasks
• Ensure all work entering a sprint meets the definition of ready: clear acceptance criteria, identified dependencies, understood technical approach, and validated alignment with the Product Manager’s intent
• Identify and surface scope, dependency, or feasibility issues at the epic level before they become delivery problems
• Elicit, analyze, and validate business and functional requirements in collaboration with the Product Manager, business stakeholders, and engineering teams
• Lead product discovery activities – including stakeholder engagement and solution validation – to ensure work is grounded in real business need before entering the pipeline
• Translate business needs into clear, delivery-ready functional requirements, user stories, process flows, and acceptance criteria
• Translate technical constraints and trade-offs back to the Product Manager and business stakeholders in accessible terms
• Serve as the primary product contact for engineering teams day to day – available to answer questions, clarify requirements, and make real-time scope decisions
• Partner with the Delivery Lead as a peer in the delivery pod. The Product Lead owns the what; the Delivery Lead owns the how and when. Neither role is subordinate to the other
• Attend and facilitate sprint reviews, translating technical progress into business value language for stakeholders and the Product Manager
• Track product performance against defined KPIs post-delivery, contributing data to value realization reviews

Minimum Education

•    Bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution or equivalent industry experience
•    Professional certification in Agile methodology preferred

Minimum Experience

•    5+ years of progressive professional experience as an IT Business Analyst, Product Owner, or comparable role on medium to large-scale software delivery initiatives
•    Demonstrated experience owning a product backlog or requirements pipeline in an agile delivery environment
•    Experience working embedded within or alongside engineering delivery teams
•    Experience with both waterfall and agile methodologies

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities

• Demonstrated ability to own and prioritize a product backlog, making sequencing and trade-off decisions that maximize value delivery
•  Proficiency with epic-to-story decomposition and the discipline to enforce readiness standards without creating unnecessary overhead
• Familiarity with value-based prioritization frameworks and the ability to apply them in a transparent, defensible way
• Advanced expertise in requirements elicitation, analysis, and documentation from diverse stakeholder groups
• Strong user story writing, process mapping, and acceptance criteria development skills
• Ability to develop business cases including options analysis, benefits, risks, and cost/benefit assessment
• Ability to evaluate technology solutions against business requirements and communicate trade-offs to non-technical audiences
• Demonstrated ability to work as a peer partner to a Delivery Lead, owning the product lane without overstepping into delivery management
• Experience facilitating refinement sessions, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives in an agile environment
• Ability to make real-time product decisions during delivery without requiring constant escalation
•  Exceptional ability to communicate complex requirements and technical trade-offs to both business and technical audiences
•  Proven ability to build trusted relationships with business stakeholders, engineering teams, and product leadership
• Strong facilitation, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in ambiguous or fast-moving situation
•  Sufficient technical fluency to engage meaningfully with engineering teams and evaluate trade-offs from a product perspective
• Proficiency with agile delivery tools (Azure DevOps / TFS preferred) and standard productivity applications

Physical Demands and Work Environment

The physical demands and work environment described here are representative of those that must be met and/or encountered by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to use hands to finger, handle, or feel; reach with hands and arms; and communicate. The employee may be required to stand; walk; sit. Specific vision abilities required by this job include the ability to view monitors, technical documents, and reference material. The noise level in the work environment is usually low to moderate.