Junior Product Owner

This role requires 4 days per week in office in Atlanta, GA or Parsippany, NJ

About the role

The Junior Product Owner will support product design, delivery, and continuous improvement for a global portfolio of strategic platforms supporting the underwriting process for Global Commercial Property and Specialty lines of business.

Working closely with the Senior Product Owner, this role will share responsibility for managing a complex, multi-platform portfolio spanning catastrophe modeling, policy administration, digital workflow, and analytics systems. The Role requires someone who is equally comfortable engaging with senior business stakeholders and working through technical requirements with IT development and BA teams.

This is a high visibility role with direct exposure to senior leadership across technology and business the successful candidate will be expected to take on increasing ownership of platforms and work streams over time.

Key responsibilities:

• Backlog Management:

  • Maintain, refine, and prioritize user stories across multiple platform backlogs in Rally

  • Partner with the IT BA team to develop detailed technical specifications and acceptance criteria

  • Ensure backlog health across active development programs and BAU maintenance tracks

• Requirements Gathering:

  • Organize and Facilitate meetings with business stakeholders including underwriters, actuaries, risk engineers, and operations teams to understand and document needs

  • Translate complex business requirements into clearly defined user stories and functional specifications

  • Maintain requirements traceability across programs, particularly where platforms are tightly integrated

• Sprint Participation:

  • Attend backlog refinement, PO sync, and sprint review meetings with the development teams

  • Review and provide structured feedback on demos, wireframes, prototypes, and other artifacts

  • Support release planning and dependency management across concurrent development tracks

• UAT Coordination:

  • Own end-to-end coordination of user acceptance testing across platforms, including planning, scheduling, environment readiness, and defect triage

  • Serve as primary liaison between business testers, the IT BA team, and development teams during UAT cycles

  • Maintain UAT tracking and reporting to ensure milestone visibility for program stakeholders

• User Engagement and Power User Support:

  • Collect, organize, and synthesize feedback from the end user community to inform the product backlog

  • Organize and facilitate regular meetings with regional power user groups across geographies

  • Act as first line of escalation for power user issues questions ensuring timely resolution or escalation to IT

• Stakeholder Communication and Change Management:

  • Maintain and update user guides release notes of platform SharePoint pages

  • Coordinate with change management and training teams to develop and deliver communications for new features and platform changes

  • Support the development and execution of training programs for new rollouts and major releases

  • Prepare materials for steering committee updates status reporting and executive communications as needed

• Vendor & Offshore Coordination:

  • Support management of vendor relationships including software providers and implementation partners

  • Coordinate with offshore delivery and augmentation teams to ensure alignment on scope, priorities, and delivery timelines

Must-have qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience in product management or business analysis in a data-driven environment, preferably insurance or financial services, or a similarly complex enterprise setting

• Experience managing the product backlog and working within agile delivery frameworks. Familiarity with Rally, JIRA, or equivalent tools required.

• Requirements documentation skills - user stories acceptance criteria and functional specifications

• Comfortable operating in a technically complex environment with multiple integrated systems and dependencies

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, able to translate between business and technical stakeholders effectively

• Organized and detail oriented, with the ability to manage multiple concurrent work streams without losing track of commitments

• Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross functional teams and manage delivery timelines across stakeholder groups

• Should be at least familiar with agile methodologies and related tools such as Rally or JIRA

• Experience documenting user stories and acceptance criteria into detailed user stories

• Experience or ability to manage a product backlog and work with development teams to prioritize

• Basic understanding of system/data integrations, comfortable in an environment with a technical focus in addition to process/operations

• Clear and concise written communication skills. Able to work with underwriters, actuaries, engineers, and other specialists to understand and translate needs into product features

Nice-to-have qualifications:

• Experience in a P&C insurance environment and general understanding of the general underwriting lifecycle

• Experience with policy administration platforms (Guidewire, Duck Creek, Majesco, Insurity, or equivalent)

• Familiarity with catastrophe modeling platforms/providers (RMS, AIR, KatRisk, CoreLogic, or equivalent)

• Understanding of Look in intelligence, geocoding, spatial data, or GIS concepts

• Experience coordinating UAT programs, including defect management and business tester engagement

• Experience supporting or coordinating with offshore or near-shore delivery teams

• Strong presentation skills and experience facilitating meetings and delivering product demos

• Agile certification (CSPO, PMI-ACP, SAFe A