Senior Technical Product Owner

EBSCO Information Services (EIS) provides a complete and optimized research solution comprised of e-journals, e-books, and research databases — all combined with the most powerful discovery service to support the information needs and maximize the research experience of our end-users. Headquartered in Ipswich, MA, EIS employs more than 3,300 people worldwide. We are the leader in our field due to our cutting-edge technology, forward-thinking philosophy, and top-notch workforce. EIS, a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., based in Birmingham, AL, is ranked in the top 200 of the nation’s largest, privately held corporations according to Forbes magazine. EBSCO is a company that will motivate you, inspire you, and allow you to grow. We are looking for the best. If you are too, we encourage you to explore our unique opportunities.

At EBSCO we’re helping build an industry leading game-changer in the FOLIO open source project.  We’re looking for a dynamic and creative Senior Technical Product Owner to work with the development and operations teams engaged in bringing this to market in an AWS hosting environment.

This position requires a results oriented individual and works directly with the development teams, customers, and partners.  The successful candidate will demonstrate and value the team’s core principles of integrity, innovation, collaboration, and flexibility, and bring an eagerness to engage in rapidly developing the right solutions.

You have a bias for action, provide appropriate and informed guidance and business direction, and break down complex problems into actionable steps that drive product development. Your success will be measured by your ability to shape and groom the product feature backlog for hosting, enabling the development teams to run at peak velocity.

You bring working knowledge of AWS and the ability to apply that knowledge.  You use your strong collaborative skills and a system’s thinking mentality to communicate and work effectively with technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

Manage the feature backlogs for the open source platform hosting team. The TPO understands the open source platform design, including the functionality expected for each of the platform modules. The TPO understands customer and partner needs with respect to the hosted solution provided to them. The TPO is also responsible for helping identify dependencies on work across the teams that is needed for successful hosting of the solution, and insuring that dependent work is tracked and executed.

The TPO works with hosting development teams on a daily basis making sure the work is clearly defined and checking against the acceptance criteria as features are completed.  Examples of definitional items you may expect to be involved in:

• Costing/business models of AWS hosting 
• Security & Privacy - as relates to the security of customer data, in particular personal user data, and compliance with local laws.
• Backup/recovery policies for hosted data
• Hosting compliance, e.g. SOC2, FedRamp
• Building in observability to the solution – audit trails, logging, usage statistics

The PO will participate in team stand-ups, triaging of production issues and help teams adhere to basic Agile and SAFe principles.

Externally, the TPO will meet regularly with customers and partners and is the team’s source of market knowledge to make sure these requirements are met.

In summary, the TPO will:

• Coordinate with stakeholders and subject matter experts to shape the vision and requirements of the hosted solution
• Act an evangelist for the hosted solution, sharing information both internally and externally
• Understand broader platform strategy and drive hosting specifications and service priorities from that; also feed hosting requirements back to the platform work
• Work directly on one or more scrum teams - manage the product backlog for those teams
• Produce concise and measurable product requirements for the dev teams to act on
• Become a subject matter expert in our capabilities for software engineers performing Development, Testing, Security and Operations functions in the AWS public cloud.
• Provide first-class customer service and ensure high quality outcomes for our customers.
• Ensure all products are effectively documented to the delight of the consumer.
• Proactively communicate progress, decisions, impediments, and risks.
• Contribute to the long term product roadmaps
• Meet with customers and partners regularly
• Travel occassionally

Skills or experience you need:

• BSCS or related engineering field; advanced degrees a plus
• Minimum of 5 years of experience working with software development teams and high degree of familiarity with the agile software development process
• Minimum of 3 years of experience as a technical product owner or equivalent
• Minimum of 2 years in a hands-on software engineering role (automated testing or dev).
• Minimum of 2 years with technical strategy and/or product management.
• Excellent presentation skills and ability to adapt to the audience (technical and non-technical).
• Strong CI/CD/CO fundamentals and experience with tools within the continuous delivery landscape (Jenkins, CircleCI, Codeship, GitLab, Travis, CodeDeploy, Azure DevOps, etc.)
• Technical familiarity with modern elastic hosting environments and related critical performance parameters; specific AWS experience a plus
• Experience operating/supporting highly available runtime software.
• Outstanding logical/structured analytical ability to effectively understand and decompose product requirements into detailed stories/specifications
• Self­ motivated, detail oriented, responsible, strong collaboration skills
• Effective presentation skills, outstanding written communication skills, able to inspire confidence of colleagues, and raise and answer key questions
• Highly effective at working with remote colleagues, including across time zones and with varied cultural backgrounds

EBSCO Industries, Inc.is an equal opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practices laws.  EBSCO strictly prohibits and does not tolerate discrimination against employees, applicants, or any other covered persons because of race, color, sex (including pregnancy), age, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.  This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including, but not limited to, hiring, training, promotion, discipline, compensation, benefits, and termination of employment.

EBSCO complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as amended by the ADA Amendments Act, and all applicable state or local law.