Product Owner, IT

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The Royal Caribbean Group’s Information Technology Team has an exciting career opportunity for a full-time IT Product Owner reporting to the Product Manager. 

The position is onsite and based in Miramar, Florida. 

Position Summary:  

 The Product Owner is responsible for working with senior management to set strategy, vision and roadmap of multiple products assuring alignment with business goals and objectives.  You are responsible for creating and maintaining a product backlog, prioritizing, driving completion of MVP/POCs, and evaluating the delivery by the agile team(s) to ensure impeccable features and functionality.  You are the owner for at least one critical software product and/or project from inception through to delivery in close collaboration with various roles from Delivery, Product, Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure and Security.  The role supports creation of all product owner deliverables to assure alignment with best practices/principles and company technology vision. The Product Owner is viewed by others as a subject matter expert in his/her product field, and a role model of corporate culture.  The role requires strong interpersonal and teamwork skills.  The Product Owner reports to the product manager. 

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:  

1.  Work with the product manager to understand customer expectations, requirements and business values for platform features. 

2. Develop a feature-based roadmap, objectives and milestones with involvement from all relevant stakeholders (internal and external) to ensure technical feasibility and alignment with the product technology roadmap. 

3. Coordinate communications between all stakeholders. Conduct milestone demonstrations with stakeholders. 

4. Write epics and user stories with acceptance criteria for the team backlog. 

5. Write user stories with sufficient details for the team to size the effort. 

6. Drive definition of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) based on business and strategic measures. 

7. Manage scope, groom and prioritize one or two team backlogs on a regular basis. 

8. Provide guidance to the team during sprint planning.  Verify accurate documentation and communication of product/application decisions and strategies. 

9. Review and accept or reject user story completion based on acceptance criteria. 

10. Identify, address, track and manage risks, and escalate when necessary, in collaboration with the Delivery Lead. Work with program and engineering managers to communicate project statuses and risks. 

11. Identify and manage cross team dependencies to prevent impediments and foster collaboration. 

12. Leverage JIRA, Confluence, and other tools to provide metrics and reports for sprint and project management. 

13. Lead, coach and mentor other product analysts and promote a culture of innovation. 

14. Remain current with business industry and operational trends in order to advise and advocate solution approaches for systems and applications to meet growing business needs. 

15. Perform other duties as required.  This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the employee occupying this position.  Employees will be required to perform any other job-related duties assigned by their supervisor or management. 

Financial Responsibilities:  

•  Responsible for all resources, including financial implications and cost of systems/services for specific products and technology solutions, during development. This includes making decisions based on the best return on investment (ROI) and understanding the cost and benefit when prioritizing the backlog. 

• Solid understanding of accounting rules for product capital and expense activities. 

• Defines optimization opportunities to manage cost and ensure technology expenditures align with business objectives. 

• Tracks effort hours by activity in time management tool. 

Qualifications, Knowledge and Skills: 

•  Requires a bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Technology or any related discipline. 

• 5+ years of work experience as a Product Owner in Software Engineering / Information Technology or related area. 

• Proven ability to lead, facilitate, coach, mentor and communicate effectively in both an interpersonal and/or group setting. 

Possesses proficiency, experience, and understanding of the core competencies outlined below. 

Customer Empathy 

• Fosters strong guest relationships via delivery on commitments, open communication, and on-going feedback/improvement. 

• Facilitates creation of the 'right' products and services to resolve guest business issues with mindmaps and user stories. 

• Communicates and models the criticality of guest focus as an organizational strategy. 

• Measures and observes guest satisfaction levels to ascertain and implement service improvement alternatives. 

• Anticipates guest needs, focusing efforts to proactively meet needs and exceed guest expectations. 

• Advises others on creating guest focused environments in various scenarios. 

Product Health 

• Manages reliability improvement projects and defines success criteria. 

• Develops performance detractors and criteria to assess and recommend product improvements. 

• Consults on the implementation of accelerated testing methods. 

• Monitors the operation of product processes and procedures. 

• Software Product Management 

• Has experience with multiple products or multiple releases of a critical product. 

• Gathers, summarizes and prioritizes ideas for new products, or new versions of existing products. 

• Describes the purpose of and a methodology for a product usability analysis. 

• Participates in defining, estimating and pricing special enhancement requests. 

• Manages conflicts between business units, sales, marketing, and engineering teams. 

• Monitors, assesses, and communicates opinion of external analysts and professional media. 

Software Product Installation and Support 

• Defines and manages the fulfillment of plans for integration with other products and platforms. 

• Estimates time and resources for initial installation and on-going support. 

• Fulfills a wide range customer-specific installation and configuration needs. 

• Analyzes new releases and data conversion needs to determine impact on installed base. 

• Influences the development and tools for product installation and support. 

• Manages or carries out installation and support services for multiple products/environments. 

Experience and Skills: 

1.  Extensive knowledge and experience engaging and empathizing with the customer, putting their wants and needs at the heart of all products; ability to leverage information to create customized guest solutions. 

2. Extensive knowledge and experience utilizing various tools and techniques for ensuring product health, reliability, availability and maintainability. 

3. Extensive knowledge and experience with methodologies, tools, and techniques for managing software products at all stages of the product lifecycle. 

4. Extensive knowledge and experience with the business aspects and operation of a software product; knowledge of the install base, current uses, future plans, and product vision. 

5. Extensive knowledge and experience in helping customers install, integrate, and operationalize software products or systems. 

6. Extensive knowledge and experience in the Travel / Hospitality industry. 

7. Extensive knowledge and experience with software development lifecycle methods (e.g., agile) 

8. Solid technology background in software development & platforms to enable leading technical professional. 

9. Able to lead and collaborate with persons at all levels of responsibility in the Information Technology and Corporate organizations to formulate, communicate and implement enterprise technical strategies. 

10. Possesses an in-depth understanding of IT estimation activities. 

11. Demonstrates ability to coordinate the analysis and problem solving of engineering problems with many individuals which results in consensus on solutions. 

12. Effective Communicator. Your writing and speaking skills are clear, articulate, and effective, demonstrating your ability to interact with and be understood by all levels and various teams across the organization. 

13. Problem Solver. You are a creative thinker, with a solid understanding of agile practices, patterns and techniques and other software development methodologies. 

14. Systemic Perspective.  You have knowledge of the interconnected set of elements for your product ecosystem, and you create innovation that achieves the desired goal or overall objectives of the whole. 

15. Collaborator and Business Liaison. You are united with teammates and follow through on commitments, so you are known as a trusted business partner and someone your teammates can count on. 

16. Organized, Efficient, and Accountable. You have a keen eye for detail and pride yourself on delivering quality work. You multitask well, re-prioritize accordingly, and meet deadlines consistently. Above all, you are flexible and able to juggle the needs of changing priorities of the business, including managing multiple projects at once. 

17. Passionate. Motivated. Eager to Learn. You are resourceful, ask smart questions, challenge the status quo, and regularly seek to understand. 

Power Skills: 

•  Action Oriented 

• Collaborates Effectively 

• Communicates Effectively 

• Drives Results 

• Situational Adaptability 

We know there's a lot to consider. As you go through the application process, our recruiters will be glad to provide guidance, and more relevant details to answer any additional questions. Thank you again for your interest in Royal Caribbean Group. We'll hope to see you onboard soon! 

It is the policy of the Company to ensure equal employment and promotion opportunity to qualified candidates without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, sexuality, gender identity or expression, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Royal Caribbean Group and each of its subsidiaries prohibit and will not tolerate discrimination or harassment.  

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