Pay range: USD $100,000.00 - $130,000.00 / Year
Your opportunity
At Schwab, you're empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us "challenge the status quo" and transform the finance industry together. The Retirement Plan Services Digital team is responsible for offer design, product management and platform operations and innovation for Schwab's retirement plan solutions. Our mandate is to strengthen and extend our digital offering to more participants, plan sponsors, and consultants as we work to further our scale and create more tailored experiences for key segments of our client base. To do this, we work with partners and delivery organizations to ensure key processes / interactions are designed and executed smoothly.
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As a Product Owner on the Retirement Plan Services Digital Team, you will be responsible for identifying and evaluating opportunities to better meet the needs of our internal business teams, plan sponsors, and plan participants across the financial spectrum. The capabilities in this area will help form the basis of how the firm meets our participants' and sponsors' needs and help drive operational efficiency gains, risk reduction, and modernization.
The role of the Product Owner is a pivotal one that is expected to be aware of industry trends, clients' needs (including internal clients), and the fundamentals of software solutions. In addition, you are expected to have a good grasp of business operations and processes that impact your product. As a Product Owner, you will convert your understanding of the marketplace, client needs, and operations into product requirements (user stories) for the Scrum team(s) in support of meeting business objectives. You will champion your product(s) and lead cross-functional initiatives within a matrixed organization. This role will have a strong focus on the back-end automation of existing business processes, but there may be a front-end element as well depending on business priorities and specific initiatives.
- Aid in development and socialization of a strategic roadmap and product plan within the context of competitor's offerings, critical client needs, pain points and business impact.
- Review and analyze relevant client and market information.
- Gather feedback from internal users.
- Lead discussions with business stakeholders and technology partners to identify initial MVP and subsequent releases. As the Product Owner, you should bring recommendations to these discussions for feedback.
- Prioritize future initiatives based on feasibility, market, client, regulatory and financial impact.
- Socialize product roadmap plan among key stakeholders and strive to ensure continuous alignment of business teams.
- Act as the Product Owner for the Scrum team(s) that develop product solutions.
- Develop, adapt, and convey the product vision to your Scrum team(s).
- Conduct product release planning sessions with the Scrum team.
- Write user stories utilizing Behavior Driven Development techniques
- Identify and document all use-cases/user scenarios. The Product Owner is accountable for identifying and documenting all needed use cases and scenarios. They should collaborate with business partners and other SMEs as needed.
- Split user stories that are too big and/or oversee this activity.
- Specify the acceptance criteria for each user story.
- Responsible for ordering and grooming the product backlog continuously by being a direct participant in the Scrum team's backlog grooming session.
- Responsible for deciding what to develop, as well as what not to develop, through direct participation in Sprint planning activities
- Provide feedback to the development team during the Daily Scrum
- Participate in the Scrum team's Sprint Review
- Accept the completion of user stories as they are demonstrated by the Scrum team
- Identify, document, and validate product success criteria (KPIs)
- Daily responsibilities might include communication of ongoing risks, scope trade-offs, timeline impacts and budget impacts to stakeholders to ensure alignment
- May support the business implementation process for the new and/or enhanced product.
- Collaborate with business partners to identify impacted business teams and processes
- May lead efforts to ensure that the operating infrastructure supporting the product is organized, documented, and deployed.
- May ensure that training and support resources are provided to frontline staff as appropriate.
- Maintain products to ensure ongoing client satisfaction and continued achievement of business goals and objectives. May be responsible for some or all the following:
- In partnership with technology, establish service level agreements that address product scale, availability, and performance standards.
- Obtain client and key stakeholder feedback on enhancements and defects. Manage the process for prioritizing these to maximize business benefit.
- Set digital OKRs for the overall initiative and for each rollout phase - the OKRs should align with and support the business OKRs.
- Ensure metrics and reporting can be maintained ongoing to support the reporting of OKRs and supporting metrics.
- May create adobe reports to support reporting needs.
- May collaborate with data and reporting teams to ensure more complex reporting needs are supported.
- As phases are rolled out and turned on in production, track OKRs and provide updates to stakeholders.
- For efforts that span multiple teams, you may need to coordinate the involved teams and ensure work is moving forward timely. This may include:
- Sequencing the high-level buckets of work that need to be completed and documenting key milestones via a timeline.
- Creating journey maps for the end-to-end experience
- Working with impacted teams/POs to identify dependencies across the impacted teams
- Leading coordination meetings that bring all impacted teams together to discuss status and roadblocks
- Coordinating the E2E testing effort across the impacted teams, ensuring teams are executing the test cases on schedule and escalating issues as needed
- Providing regular status updates to business, technology, and digital stakeholders. Updates should include the progress of the initiative compared to the plan, any roadblocks, escalations, decisions needed, any scope/prioritization changes, etc.
What you have
- Detailed understanding and knowledge of the retirement industry. Ability to utilize that knowledge to inform product roadmaps and write user stories that capture edge-cases and scenarios.
- Detailed understanding and knowledge of business operations, processes, and procedures. Ability to utilize that knowledge to inform trade-off decisions, identify edge-cases and scenarios that need to be defined for the scrum team, inform troubleshooting and help identify business workarounds when needed.
- Ability to gather information from multiple sources (internal and through primary and secondary research) and synthesize them to uncover trends that draw out relevant and actionable conclusions.
- Be able to conceptualize solutions that leverage current technologies through the understanding of industry trends, internal business drivers and client needs.
- Translate needs and business imperatives from product vision and roadmaps for use in setting priorities and guiding the work of the Scrum team(s).
- Ability to think and act creatively by stepping outside standard convention to identify potential "out of the box" solutions.
- Apply management and collaboration skills to orchestrate and maximize the work and deliverables of cross-organization and cross-functional teams assigned to product initiatives.
- Possess the ability to maintain focus and drive results in all business cycles and environments.
- Demonstrate adaptability when projects need to deviate from original plans or shift direction based on changing needs and priorities.
- Be a great listener - Understand the value of listening to client needs and understand the deeper underlying problem that needs to be addressed.
- Servant Leadership - Able to garner respect from your Scrum team(s), lead and demonstrate value-add principles, and willing and able to get your hands dirty to get the job done.
- Attitude of transparency - Desire and ability to bring disclosure and transparency to the Scrum team and grow trust between the business and development.
- Conflict resolution - Able to facilitate discussion of issues, different approaches, alternatives, and effectively resolve them promptly.
- Fully educated and conversant on the Scrum process according to the Scrum Guide and can apply their understanding in practical terms.
- A thorough understanding and appreciation for Agile values and principles.
- Thorough understanding of and proven ability to:
- Write user stories and acceptance criteria
- Split large stories into smaller stories
- Groom the backlog
- Conduct Release planning
- Conduct Sprint planning
- Navigate the Sprint review activities
- Possess a strong grasp of software development and technology.
Desired
- Prior retirement business and operational experience
- Scrum Product Owner certification
- Experience in a Scaled Agile framework
- Prior experience using Jira and Rally
In addition to the salary range, this role is also eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities.
What's in it for you
At Schwab, we're committed to empowering our employees' personal and professional success. Our purpose-driven, supportive culture, and focus on your development means you'll get the tools you need to make a positive difference in the finance industry. Our Hybrid Work and Flexibility approach balances our ongoing commitment to workplace flexibility, serving our clients, and our strong belief in the value of being together in person on a regular basis.
We offer a competitive benefits package that takes care of the whole you - both today and in the future:
- 401(k) with company match and Employee stock purchase plan
- Paid time for vacation, volunteering, and 28-day sabbatical after every 5 years of service for eligible positions
- Paid parental leave and family building benefits
- Tuition reimbursement
- Health, dental, and vision insurance