Principal Product Owner

Pacific Gas and Electric Company; Oakland (CA); Hybrid; USD 151,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s Enterprise Data team seeks a Principal Product Owner to serve as the connective tissue across our enterprise data ecosystem. You will work with business leaders and data teams to translate needs into outcomes, align investments, and maximize value from analytics, governance, architecture, and platforms.

Hybrid work from Oakland with 1–2 days in the office. You are a strategist and diplomat who can move across executives, engineers, analysts, and programs,

Qualifications

• Minimum: High School or GED; 7 years job-related experience.
• Desired: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience; Agile experience; Agile certification.

Responsibilities

• You ensure value is realized by starting with outcomes, linking investments to measurable value, and evaluating value over time.
• You connect the pieces between business leaders, data teams, technology teams, and major programs.
• You align strategy, capabilities, roadmaps, and investments to support outcomes and objectives.
• You champion trusted data, fostering ownership, stewardship, quality, and governance.
• You lead through influence, building trusted relationships and guiding decisions through collaboration.
• Additional responsibilities include coaching, stakeholder engagement, and leading complex programs.

Skills

Product ownership

Agile methodology

Stakeholder engagement

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

High School diploma or GED

Job description

Department Overview

Enterprise Data delivers on the outcome that trusted data shall empower everyone to deliver on our purpose and stands. We bring together data management, governance, engineering, analytics, architecture, and platforms to help the company solve its most consequential challenges.

Position Summary

Are you the person people seek out when the problem is messy, the stakeholders disagree, and nobody is quite sure where to start?

Do you instinctively look for the connections others miss? Can you move between executives, engineers, architects, analysts, and business leaders and somehow get everyone focused on the same outcome? Are you more interested in creating value than defending a process, a technology, or an organizational boundary?

If your heart picked up reading those questions, then keep reading.

PG&E's Enterprise Data department is looking for a Principal Product Owner to serve as the connective tissue across our enterprise data ecosystem.

Most organizations have specialists. Data engineers engineer. Architects architect. Analysts analyze. Governance people govern. The challenge is that business problems do not care how we are organized.

This role exists to connect the pieces and maximize the value they create.

You will work with business leaders to understand their challenges, connect them to the right enterprise capabilities, and help guide investments across data, analytics, governance, architecture, and technology platforms. Sometimes that means creating something new. Often it means helping the company realize greater value from the investments it has already made.

You will help answer the questions that matter: Are we solving the right problem? Are we creating needle-moving value? Are we getting enough value to justify continued investment? What should we build, improve, expand, consolidate, and - gasp - retire?

You are part strategist, part translator, part diplomat, and a little bit troublemaker. You are curious. When you get up in the morning, you are thinking about how you will collaborate today. You thrive in ambiguity, love it, see it as your opportunity, your playground. Your favorite T-shirt says 'I change the things I cannot accept' - status quo is not your thing.

In this role, data is not the destination. Value is.

This position is hybrid, working from your remote office and at the Oakland Corporate Office approximately 1 - 2 days per week, or more, based on business needs.

Job Responsibilities

• You ensure value is realized
  o You start with outcomes, not solutions.
  o You distinguish what people ask for from what they actually need.
  o You connect investments, capabilities, and enterprise priorities to measurable business value.
  o You establish visibility into whether value is actually being realized over time.
  o You recommend improving, expanding, consolidating, or ruthlessly retiring investments based on evidence rather than enthusiasm.
• You connect the pieces
  o You serve as the connective tissue between business leaders, data teams, technology teams, and major programs.
  o You connect business challenges to the data, analytics, governance, architecture, and technology capabilities needed to address them.
  o You help people see dependencies, opportunities, and relationships that are not immediately obvious.
  o You identify opportunities to leverage existing investments before creating new ones.
  o You bring together stakeholders around outcomes that no single organization can achieve alone.
• You align strategy, capabilities, roadmaps, and investments
  o You translate business priorities into enterprise capabilities.
  o You help shape and integrate roadmaps across products, teams, platforms, and programs.
  o You identify gaps, overlaps, dependencies, and investment opportunities across the portfolio.
  o You help leadership make informed prioritization and investment decisions.
  o You ensure capabilities evolve in support of business outcomes and strategic objectives.
• You champion trusted data
  o You help leaders understand the relationship between trusted data, operational performance, risk management, analytics, and value outcomes.
  o You influence adoption of data ownership, stewardship, quality, and governance practices.
  o You promote enterprise solutions over local optimization.
  o You create understanding of why trusted data matters, not merely what people should do.
  o You help cultivate a culture in which data is treated as a strategic enterprise asset.
• You lead through influence
  o You build trusted relationships across organizational boundaries.
  o You listen first.
  o You challenge assumptions empathetically.
  o You influence decisions through credibility, collaboration, and insight rather than authority.
  o You BFF the business; you learn who is who and you win their hearts and minds.
• Additional responsibilities
  o Identifies the developmental needs of others, and coaches and mentors others to improve their knowledge or skills.
  o Identifies the appropriate customer audience, their preferred communication channels, and potential customer response benchmarks.
  o Leads complex or major projects with high corporate or functional priority.
  o Acts as primary liaison between various departments, Stakeholders, business community, and lines of businesses.
  o Develops implementation plans and establish teams to introduce new technology
  o Evaluates new products and equipment and keeps abreast of new products and/or equipment available in the market.
  o Provides product feedback and customer insight to support product development.
  o Partners with products organization to deliver feedback on existing products and introduce potential products for future programs.
  o Analyzes work plan and schedules to reallocate resources or reprioritize program work.
  o Develops new highly complex products.

Qualifications

Minimum:

• High School or GED-General Educational Development-GED Diploma
• 7 years job-related experience

Desired:

• Bachelors Degree or equivalent experience
• Experience as Product Owner, Agile environment, 5 years
• Agile Certification

The person who is best fit for this role will likely feel more comfortable in the accession process through preparation. With that in mind, this should be one of the most straightforward experiences you have had in terms of demonstrating excellent fit. The following clearly outlines what we will look for as we partner to determine a path forward.

• Regard the 5 bullets in the job responsibilities as a scorecard; you differentiate yourself by explaining how you do each of those items well with proof from your job experience
• You can prepare your mind by familiarizing yourself with the Data Management Body of Knowledge to understand the domain, 'California Burning' to understand the company-level data issues, and the body of knowledge surrounding lean as a mindset for team and organization operations and as a quality management framework
• You demonstrate how you will work with people, teams, and stakeholders by treating our introductory sessions, not as a question-and-answer forum, but rather as a collaboration to determine fit and how we would work together

Compensation

PG&E is providing the full salary/pay range for this position. The actual amount paid to an individual will be based on multiple factors, including, but not limited to, internal equity, specific skills, education, licenses or certifications, experience, market value, and geographic location. The range to reasonably expect will be around the minimum and the midpoint of the range. The final decision will be made on a case-by-case basis related to the factors above. This job is also eligible to participate in PG&E’s discretionary incentive compensation programs.

• Bay Area Minimum: $151,000
• Bay Area Midpoint: $204,000
• Bay Area Maximum: $257,000