Agile Data Product Owner (contract)

Title: Agile Data Product Owner Location: 11625 N Community House Rd Charlotte, NC Duration: 12 months Work Engagement: W2 Work Schedule: 3 days in office/2 days remote Benefits on offer for this contract position: Health Insurance, Life insurance, 401K and Voluntary Benefits Summary: In this contingent resource assignment, you may: Consult on complex initiatives with broad impact and large-scale planning for Transformation Coaching. Review and analyze complex multi-faceted, larger scale or longer-term Transformation Coaching challenges that require in-depth evaluation of multiple factors including intangibles or unprecedented factors. Contribute to the resolution of complex and multi-faceted situations requiring solid understanding of the function, policies, procedures, and compliance requirements that meet deliverables. Strategically collaborate and consult with client personnel. Required Qualifications: Agile (Coaching, Scrum, or product owner) experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work or consulting experience, training, military experience, education. Responsibilities: • Serve as the business authority for a defined data product area, including helping define, document, and prioritize software requirements and supporting appropriate SDLC deliverable approvals where applicable. • Develop, evolve, and communicate the product area vision, priorities, goals, and strategy to key partners and stakeholders while obtaining feedback, managing risk, and ensuring regulatory and policy compliance. • Partner with Product Management on the overall product intention map, product strategy, roadmap alignment, and prioritization decisions, ensuring the product area backlog reflects near-term delivery needs and longer-term strategic outcomes. • Establish, communicate, and monitor product area goals, performance indicators, and value measures, including business value, delivery outcomes, customer/stakeholder outcomes, data quality outcomes, operational readiness, and risk/control considerations. • Own prioritization of a clearly understood product area backlog aligned to product area vision, goals, stakeholder needs, and product strategy. • Ensure all known work is added to the backlog and made transparent, including delivery work, discovery work, business readiness work, data quality/remediation work, governance work, dependency work, risk/control work, and operational readiness work. • Define and refine features, user stories, business readiness stories, acceptance criteria, and supporting context so delivery teams understand the intended customer, business, data, control, and operational outcomes. • Write clear, concise features and collaborate with delivery teams to refine features and stories into appropriately sized, testable, value-oriented backlog items. • Validate completed work by accepting user stories after acceptance criteria and the definition of done have been met. • Facilitate frequent collaboration between customers, stakeholders, Product Management, delivery teams, technology partners, governance partners, and other Product Owners throughout the product lifecycle. • Coordinate with other Product Owners to resolve sequencing, prioritization, scope, and dependency conflicts across products, product areas, delivery teams, and shared data capabilities. • Be available to the team to answer questions, clarify requirements, address escalated impediments, and support timely decisions that keep work aligned with value and risk expectations. • Actively participate in product area events and Agile ceremonies, including backlog refinement, planning, review/demo, retrospectives, PO syncs, dependency discussions, PI planning activities where applicable, and stakeholder readouts. • Translate data product needs into actionable delivery work, including data sourcing, ingestion, conformance, semantic modeling, reporting/presentation layer needs, data quality rules, metadata, lineage, access, controls, and downstream consumer readiness where applicable. • Collaborate with data governance, technology, risk, compliance, and business stakeholders to ensure product area delivery aligns with applicable data management policies, SDLC expectations, access/control requirements, and regulatory commitments. • Use Agile workflow and collaboration tools, such as Jira and Confluence, to maintain transparent backlog structure, traceability, prioritization, status, dependencies, and delivery readiness. • Promote role clarity by focusing on product value, stakeholder alignment, backlog health, and acceptance decisions rather than acting as a Scrum Master, project manager, technical expert, people manager, backlog administrator, or order-taker. • Define and communicate data product success criteria, adoption metrics, data quality outcomes, and business value measurements to ensure delivered capabilities meet stakeholder expectations. • Partner with Data Governance, Data Management, and Technology teams to ensure data standards, metadata requirements, lineage expectations, and control requirements are incorporated into product delivery. • Support prioritization of technical debt, data quality remediation, platform modernization, and control enhancement work alongside business-facing capabilities. Qualifications: • Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. • Digital product management, product ownership, Agile delivery, data product management, business analysis, data management, or equivalent. • Experience serving as a Product Owner, Agile Product Owner, Business Product Owner, Data Product Owner, Business Analyst, Data Product Lead, or similar role supporting Agile delivery teams (product area ownership, backlog prioritization, user story refinement, acceptance criteria, and delivery team collaboration). • Experience with data management, data governance, data quality, metadata, lineage, data integration, remediation, reporting, analytics, or enterprise data platforms. • Experience with Agile practices and frameworks, such as Scrum, Kanban, or scaled Agile methods, and workflow/collaboration tools such as Jira and Confluence. • Ability to translate product vision, business outcomes, policy requirements, stakeholder needs, and data product requirements into clear features, stories, acceptance criteria, and backlog priorities. • Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to facilitate collaboration across business, technology, risk, compliance, operations, analytics, and data governance partners. • Strong risk management leadership skills, including the ability to identify, communicate, prioritize, and help remediate delivery, data, compliance, policy, operational, and dependency risks. • Strong dependency management skills, including the ability to coordinate sequencing and priority conflicts across products, product areas, systems, teams, and stakeholder groups. • Agile certifications such as Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO), SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager (POPM), SAFe Agilist, or PMI-ACP. (preferred) • Ability to communicate effectively in written and verbal formats at multiple levels of the organization, including senior leadership, product partners, delivery teams, data consumers, and control partners. • Ability to influence and lead organizational change in a matrixed environment while building effective business partnerships across teams and functions. • Experience working with delivery teams and supporting team-level execution through backlog refinement, sprint/iteration planning, acceptance criteria clarification, demos/reviews, and product feedback loops. • Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to facilitate discussion, evaluate trade-offs, and guide stakeholders and teams toward the best available solution based on value, risk, feasibility, dependencies, and delivery readiness. • Familiarity with relevant job-specific skill areas such as Agile Methodology, Data Management, Data Modeling, Data Analysis, Data Insights, Product Management, Product Strategies, Stakeholder Management, Prioritization, Risk Management, Regulatory Compliance, Requirement Documents, Written Communication, and Workflow Organization. • Experience working with enterprise data warehouses, cloud-based data platforms, reporting and analytics solutions, or data governance programs. • Experience working in highly regulated environments requiring adherence to risk, compliance, audit, and policy requirements.