Product Owner

Avenga; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Avenga is seeking a Product Owner with deep clinical domain experience in oncology to join our agile team. You will translate clinical needs into a clear backlog, accept stories, and guide the roadmap with the voice of the clinician.

You will work with oncologists, nurses, and hospital IT, write user stories and acceptance criteria, and help ensure tools are adopted in care delivery. Familiarity with EMR/EHR data, SAFe, and Atlassian tools is highly valued.

Qualifications

• Direct oncology care experience in a hospital, cancer center, or clinical software company.
• End-to-end oncology patient journey understanding including referral, diagnostic workup, staging, treatment, and follow-up.
• Familiarity with EMR/EHR data, pathology and radiology reporting, biomarker reports, and interoperability limits (HL7 v2, FHIR, DICOM).
• Ability to run discovery sessions with clinicians and translate insights into clear requirements.

Responsibilities

• Lead the definition phase to build the delivery backlog.
• Lead refinement with the development team to plan value delivery across sprints and iterations.
• Support the Business Product Manager in processing customer requests and prioritizing the discovery backlog.
• Contribute to preparing feature and enabler backlog for the next Program Increment (PI).
• Socialize incoming features and enablers with the development team early to surface feedback and align with PI objectives.
• Keep the backlog focused on items maximizing clinical and business value while minimizing cost.
• Bring clinical evidence into prioritization: real user observation, clinician feedback, and usage data.
• Learn and fully understand all functionality of the product, and manage its requirements baseline.

Skills

Clinical domain depth

Oncology care

SAFe

Jira/Confluence

Stakeholder management

User stories

Clinical software familiarity

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

The Product Owner is the member of the agile team who acts as the voice of the customer. In this role, that customer is a clinician. You contribute to the vision and roadmap, communicate it clearly to the team, accept stories, and continuously refine and prioritize the team backlog. What makes this role different from a general Product Owner position is the depth of clinical understanding we expect you to bring to every one of those activities.

What we look for first: clinical domain depth

• Direct experience in oncology care delivery, or in a closely adjacent clinical specialty, gained in a hospital, cancer center, clinical network, or a company building software used at the point of care.
• A working model of the oncology patient journey end to end: referral and intake, diagnostic workup, staging and biomarker testing, multidisciplinary team discussion, treatment decision, treatment delivery, follow up and surveillance. You can explain where time is lost, where information goes missing, and where decisions are actually made.
• Practical understanding of how a hospital runs: who does what in a care team, how a clinician's day is structured, what competes for their attention, and why well designed tools still fail to get adopted.
• Familiarity with the clinical data landscape: EMR and EHR systems, pathology and radiology reporting, genomic and biomarker reports, and the real limits of interoperability (HL7 v2, FHIR, DICOM).
• The ability to hold a conversation with oncologists, pathologists, nurses, and hospital IT as a peer. You can run a discovery session with a clinician, follow the clinical reasoning, push back when something does not add up, and return with requirements that reflect what they meant rather than what they said.
• Awareness of the regulatory and quality frame that clinical software operates in (medical device software, clinical safety, patient data protection) and what it means for how we specify, evidence, and release a change.

What you will use every day:

• Translating clinical needs into a prioritized, correctly scoped team backlog, with input from architecture, security, and UX.
• Writing user stories, acceptance criteria, and technical requirements that a team can build from without guessing.
• Working in agile at scale. We run SAFe. If you bring the clinical depth and have not worked in SAFe before, we will get you there.
• Working fluently in Atlassian tooling (Jira, Confluence).
• Running demos of working software and speaking to the development team from the user's perspective.
• Analytical and negotiation skills, and the judgment to say no to work that does not earn its place.
• A background in software development is a plus.

What you will do:

• Lead the definition phase to build the delivery backlog.
• Lead refinement with the development team to plan the delivery of value across sprints and iterations.
• Support the Business Product Manager in processing customer requests and prioritizing the discovery backlog.
• Contribute, as part of the Product Management team, to preparing the feature and enabler backlog so the train is ready for the next Program Increment.
• Socialize incoming features and enablers with the development team early, to surface feedback and align with PI objectives.
• Keep the prepared backlog focused on items that maximize clinical and business value while minimizing cost.
• Bring clinical evidence into prioritization: real user observation, clinician feedback, and usage data rather than assertion.
• Learn and fully understand all functionality of the product, and manage its requirements baseline.

Who you are:

• You are motivated by improving how cancer care is delivered, and you can explain concretely what that means.
• You lead by moving things forward and making sure commitments land.
• You question established norms and practices when they stand in the way of the outcome.
• You stay focused on results aligned with the strategic vision.
• You manage stakeholders well and guide a process to a decision.
• You communicate and negotiate clearly, in writing and in the room.
• You have a strong desire to understand global customer needs, and you go and look rather than assume.