Product Owner - Partner Integration

Description and Requirements
JOB DESCRIPTION
POSITION TITLE: Product Owner - Partner Integrations
DEPARTMENT: Small Business Solutions (GOP ART)
LOCATION: Cary, NC / Remote
GRADE : 11M
THE ROLE:
Our Product Owner is the lead customer advocate that translates the customers' needs to development teams' value-driven outcomes. At the role's core, the Product Owner is a communicator, continuously speaking with stakeholders, learning what improvements they desire most, and then translating those needs and desirable outcomes into actionable product backlog items for development teams and stakeholders. Furthermore, the Product Owner is responsible for understanding how to best breakdown work efforts into vertical slices that can impact the business within predictable weekly iterations and quarterly increments in the form of Stories and Features. The Product Owner then leverages this knowledge in the form of forecasting for the purposes of stakeholder expectation management. Always erring on the side of transparency, the Product Owner must be comfortable with saying "NO" to stakeholders when it means protecting the team's productivity and morale as well as the overall vision for the product. Finally, operating in an environment still evolving its agile maturity, this role requires a partnership with other Product Owners, Product Managers, and Scrum Masters as well as waterfall teams, both to align their efforts and to create an environment of peer learning, mentoring, and coaching.
Reports to: Syed B Hussain
Direct Reports: NA
Key Responsibilities:

• Develop a comprehensive integration strategy aligned with overall product goals, identifying key integration points and priorities across different systems.
• Understand business requirements and translate them into clear integration use cases and user stories.
• Collaborate with system architects for API specifications and data mapping.

• Work with Product Managers to understand product strategy and roadmap, customer needs, and business goals that will inform features and user stories.

• Support iterative planning activities with insight gained from continuous prioritization, team backlog refinement and evolving expertise in business processes and platform functionality.
• Drive successful team execution by defining and introducing features, user stories and acceptance criteria with clarity and focus that encourages viable solutions, quality development, trade-off analysis and decisive action to achieve incremental value.
• Identify dependencies and obstacles and proactively rally the team, seeking options to mitigate.
• Collaborate with POs across all ARTs to achieve shared objectives.
• Manage customer and stakeholder expectations by supporting iterative demonstrations of completed work.
• Support test plans by ensuring ongoing understanding of planned work, engaging in defect resolution, and assisting in various test activities.

Essential Skills and Behaviors :
• Customer Focus - Work with end-users and internal stakeholders to elicit product needs to support the next generation of MetLife software.
• Communication - Ability to understand and speak articulately about technology combined with an ability to synthesize and prioritize customer needs from a business perspective to engineering teams.
• Collaborative - Work closely with engineering teams to build customer value into the product; able to set context and frame the "what & why", so that they can decide on the "how".
• Relentless Improvement - Continuously owning the responsibility of "built-in quality" as the source of product backlog item development to ensure goal-oriented development that will meet the quality and behavioral conditions of satisfaction of our customers.
• Adaptability - Balances changes in direction or requirements while protecting commitments to minimize work in progress.
• Transparency - Offer data and analysis driven forecasting to set realistic expectations to the business.
Travel Requirements: 5%
CANDIDATE QUALIFICATIONS:
REQUIRED
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field
• 3 - 5 years' experience delivering IT solutions via agile methodology
• 3 - 5 years' experience as a Product Owner, with experience maturing and running multiple teams simultaneously
PREFERRED
• Experience working within a traditional Software Development Life-Cycle.
• Experience working on infrastructure teams in the insurance or finance industry.
• Exposure and experience to claim processing in the insurance or finance industry.
• Demonstrable experience leading technical teams through the change from Waterfall to Agile methodology
• SAFE Agile experience
The salary range for applicants for this position is $75,000-100,000.
Benefits We Offer
Our U.S. benefits address holistic well-being with programs for physical and mental health, financial wellness, and support for families. We offer a comprehensive health plan that includes medical/prescription drug and vision, dental insurance, and no-cost short- and long-term disability. We also provide company-paid life insurance and legal services, a retirement pension funded entirely by MetLife and 401(k) with employer matching, group discounts on voluntary insurance products including auto and home, pet, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and accident insurance, as well as Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and digital mental health programs, parental leave, volunteer time off, tuition assistance and much more!
About MetLife
Recognized on Fortune magazine's list of the 2024 "World's Most Admired Companies", Fortune World's 25 Best Workplaces™ for 2024, as well as the 2024 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For ®, MetLife , through its subsidiaries and affiliates, is one of the world's leading financial services companies; providing insurance, annuities, employee benefits and asset management to individual and institutional customers. With operations in more than 40 markets, we hold leading positions in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Our purpose is simple - to help our colleagues, customers, communities, and the world at large create a more confident future. United by purpose and guided by empathy, we're inspired to transform the next century in financial services. At MetLife, it's #AllTogetherPossible . Join us!
Equal Employment Opportunity/Disability/Veterans
If you need an accommodation due to a disability, please email us at [email protected]. This information will be held in confidence and used only to determine an appropriate accommodation for the application process.
MetLife maintains a drug-free workplace.
$75,000-100,000