Term-Limited Procurement System Product Owner - Program Management I - Hybrid

About the position

The Procurement System Product Owner represents state agency business and its stakeholders in the full life cycle of a new statewide procurement system solution or 'product.' While possessing some technical knowledge and skills, the Product Owner is an individual with a strong grasp of state business priorities, strategies, needs, mission, workflows, and crucially makes the critical decisions on behalf of state business during product implementation and administration. The Product Owner is responsible for both selecting the product and ensuring that its data, workflow, and other business functions work well together and meet the State's requirements. This is accomplished through regularly soliciting feedback from State stakeholders, understanding the feedback's importance to business operations across multiple agencies, and applying the business knowledge gained to the State Procurement System product. The Product Owner prioritizes all elements of the system implementation and any enhancements including the development backlog and integration with other systems. The Product Owner determines the acceptable, minimum viable product (MVP) and approves each MVP release from development to production IT environments.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with state executive leadership, the project governance structure, OIT, SPCO, statewide procurement staff, and other experts to adopt a solution system selection process and implementation strategy.
• Lead coordination of the vendor solicitation process for the procurement system project with DPA and OIT.
• Determine the solicitation selection committee members and evaluation criteria.
• Lead the state's negotiation following the public solicitation, cooperative purchase, or other sourcing process.
• Serve as the single point of contact for state agencies and outside vendors regarding the business needs for the procurement system project.
• Lead end-to-end agile based product development and implementation to enable the delivery of modern services that meet the business needs of users.
• Establish the environment necessary to operate as a high-performing cross-functional team in partnership with stakeholders.
• Support product team members by helping them clear challenges they may encounter.
• Partnership with scrum and product team members including but not limited to user experience designer, technical leads, database experts, functional leads (e.g. other product owners), and state agency users and leaders.
• Contribute to a cohesive team culture of alignment, trust, empowerment, and collective investment in the success of the products.
• Serve as final business decision maker during the agile implementation process including prioritizing the product backlog, determining product release strategy, and validating user personas and user stories.
• Communicate with cross-agency partners throughout the state to ensure we are meeting business needs, enabling long-term success, and setting expectations.
• Translate IT process and tool strategies to support agency day-to-day efforts, driving toward greater efficiencies and higher quality deliverables.
• Create feedback loops so that end users of this procurement system solution are able to influence its development and implementation.
• Develop and communicate the vision, strategy, and product roadmap.
• Drive open communication regarding the project with the state agency users.
• Share knowledge, techniques, tools, patterns, and expert advice with colleagues, partners, and the public.
• Promote connections for partners across the government.

Requirements

• At least eight (8) years of relevant experience in Project Management of large-scale projects representing multiple organization stakeholders.
• Product ownership in procurement, financial, or enterprise wide system implementation or management.
• Program management experience (managing workflows, staff, or other relevant experience).

Nice-to-haves

• Experience launching products that replace or install new procurement, financial, or enterprise wide systems.
• Analytical skills: Ability to deconstruct information into smaller categories in order to draw conclusions.
• Collaboration skills expressed through astute emotional intelligence application during close work with others to achieve a common goal.
• Effective communication skills: Ability to use language to express and share information with any stakeholder.
• Storytelling: Ability to correlate business need to solution opportunity, and solution outcomes to business gain/value.
• Knowledge of scrum and agile software development, software development, coding and designing, product development architecture, UX principles, product backlog management, and user story design and production.

Benefits

• Full benefits package offered.