Product Owner

About Appen

Appen is a leader in AI enablement for critical tasks such as model improvement, supervision, and evaluation. To do this we leverage our global crowd of over one million skilled contractors, speaking over 180 languages and dialects, representing 130 countries. In addition, we utilize the industry's most advanced AI-assisted data annotation platform to collect and label various types of data like images, text, speech, audio, and video.

Our data is crucial for building and continuously improving the world's most innovative artificial intelligence systems and Appen is already trusted by the world's largest technology companies. Now with the explosion of interest in generative AI, Appen is helping leaders in automotive, financial services, retail, healthcare, and governments the confidence to deploy world-class AI products.

At Appen, we are purpose driven. Our fundamental role in AI is to ensure all models are helpful, honest, and harmless, so we firmly believe in unlocking the power of AI to build a better world. We have a learn-it-all culture that values perspective, growth, and innovation. We are customer-obsessed, action-oriented, and celebrate winning together.

At Appen, we are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

The Product Owner is pivotal in bridging product management and development teams, ensuring product features and functionality align with the strategic vision. This role demands ownership of the product lifecycle, from conception to delivery, emphasizing on-time, budget-conscious, and quality-focused outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Product Manager(s) to drive product vision, strategy and roadmap.
• Understand company strategic and competitive position and correlate with product.
• Lead the ideation, technical development, and launch of innovative tools, platforms, and/or products.
• Drive product development with teams of world-class engineers and designers.
• Own product development and delivery across the complete lifecycle
• Own product backlog and prioritization
• Translate Business requirements into Product requirements and help with architecture and design.
• Define and articulate personas, epics, and story points.
• Help close gaps for development team to finalize technical design/ technical specifications.
• Help close gaps for QA team to finalize test scenarios, test coverage and test efficacy.
• Collaborate with Devops and Engineering team to create and own product release map and release checklist (quality gates, release notes, user training, etc.)
• Define and analyze metrics that inform the success of products. Identify and track key performance metrics.
• Order backlog items to best achieve business goals.
• Optimize the value of the dev team's work in each sprint.
• Conduct user research, gather feedback from customers, and incorporate insights into product development with Product Manager(s) to ensure that the product meets user needs and expectations.
• Identify potential risks and dependencies early in the development process, proactively addressing them to minimize disruptions and ensure smooth product delivery.
• Regularly review and reflect on the product development process, seeking opportunities to improve efficiency, quality, and team collaboration through retrospectives and other feedback mechanisms.

Qualifications

• Minimum 10-year experience working with Product Manager(s) and Engineers while building new product.
• Experience working directly with Engineers on product enhancements.
• Experience working in agile-enabled teams.
• Experience in SaaS environment.
• Proven ability to understand complex business problems, apply strong analytical skills and create an effective strategy.
• Technical fluency: ability to understand and discuss architectural concepts, schedule tradeoffs and new opportunities with technical team members.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to work across functions.
• Excellent platform experience intuition; demonstrated success in creating innovative and user-friendly software applications and customer-facing features.
• Nimbleness and comfort with ambiguity; ability to respond rapidly to evolving threats and opportunities.
• Demonstrated ability to translate strategic differentiators into innovative and detailed product requirements.
• Proven ability to make smart features (customer experience) versus time-to-market trade-offs; experience using data and metrics to back up assumptions and assertions of business value.
• MBA and/or Engineering degree
• Ability to play the role of scrum master will be a positive