Product Owner I

tsys; Lindon (UT); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

tsys is seeking a Product Owner to bridge product strategy with technical execution in Lindon, UT. You will own the development backlog, decompose features into user stories, and ensure readiness for delivery.

You’ll collaborate with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineering to minimize churn and deliver high-quality features on schedule. The role emphasizes defining acceptance criteria, guiding story mapping, and coordinating with QA and Release Management to ensure successful releases.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent required.
• 6–8 years of relevant experience.
• Experience owning or managing a development team backlog.
• Experience writing user stories and defining acceptance criteria.
• Familiarity with Jira/Confluence for backlog management.

Responsibilities

• Owns and manages the development team's backlog including stories, bugs, tasks, and technical debt.
• Decomposes features into user stories with complete acceptance criteria.
• Collaborates with Product Designers and Engineering Leads to align on scope and delivery.
• Defines story readiness and ensures clear criteria before development."
• Drives backlog refinement and readiness ceremonies to match product priorities.

Skills

Backlog management

User stories & acceptance criteria

Product ownership

Agile delivery

Stakeholder collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Job Description

Summary of This Role

Serves as the tactical bridge between product strategy and technical execution, translating product vision into clearly defined, deliverable work items. Owns and manages the development team's backlog as the primary working inventory for delivery, ensuring stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, and feature work are clearly understood, prioritized, refined, and ready for execution. Partners closely with Product Managers, Product Designers, Engineering Leads, QA, Release Management, and other stakeholders to reduce churn and waste, remove blockers, and drive features from definition through release verification. Operates as the day-to-day decision-maker on story-level scope, backlog sequencing, functional completeness, and delivery readiness within the team's workflow, while aligning to product strategy and roadmap direction set by Product Management.

What Part Will You Play?

Owns and manages the development team's backlog, including stories, bugs, tasks, technical debt, support-driven work, and feature decomposition work. Ensures the backlog is healthy, current, prioritized, and aligned with Product Manager priorities, committed deadlines, delivery capacity, and cross-team dependencies. Champions and supports the product development team by reducing churn and waste, removing blockers, and ensuring work is sufficiently defined before entering development.

Decomposes Product Manager-defined Features into individual user stories, ensuring complete coverage of approved scope across child work items. Authors story-level functional acceptance criteria including observable behaviors, boundary logic, conditional variants, UX copy, field validations, and error states that are specific, testable, and unambiguous. Partners with Development Leads on high-level story mapping, backlog sequencing, and execution planning to align delivery with release timelines, capacity, and dependencies.

Collaborates with Product Designers to embed high-fidelity UX specifications, annotated mockups, and interaction behaviors into story acceptance criteria. Ensures design intent is fully captured at the story level so engineering teams can execute without ambiguity. Partners with Engineering throughout technical review, architecture validation, and estimation, incorporating technical feedback before stories enter development.

Owns and enforces the team Definition of Ready, validating that every story entering a development pod has clear functional acceptance criteria, required UX context, technical review input, dependency awareness, and applicable feature flag documentation. Serves as the final functional acceptance authority on individual stories, with Product Manager partnership on major, high-risk, or strategically significant features.

Drives story refinement and delivery readiness ceremonies by presenting stories, clarifying expected behavior, resolving open questions, and ensuring the team understands business rules and functional outcomes. Participates in Monthly Planning, Release Verification, Support Triage, and Backlog Prioritization sessions to keep delivery execution aligned with product priorities and operational needs.

Manages feature flag lifecycle at the story level, including documentation of flag states, creation of cleanup tickets after release, and coordination with Release Management on staged rollout configurations. Supports observability and monitoring requirements for high-risk features by partnering with Engineering to define success metrics and alerting thresholds where applicable.

Collaborates with other Product Owners across teams when features span multiple domains, ensuring consistent scope coverage, dependency alignment, and synchronized delivery timelines. Coordinates with QA, Release Management, Technical Writing, Learning, Support, and other stakeholders as needed to support release readiness, documentation, training, and adoption.

Continuously improves team delivery practices by identifying process gaps, proposing workflow enhancements, and maintaining clear documentation for repeatable execution.

What Are We Looking For in This Role?

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree
• Relevant experience or degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field; combination of relevant training and/or experience in lieu of degree
• Typically minimum 6-8 years relevant experience
• Experience in business analysis, product ownership, product delivery, or a similar role within a software product organization
• Direct experience owning or managing a development team backlog, writing user stories, defining acceptance criteria, and creating functional specifications

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in an Agile delivery environment such as Scrum or Kanban with hands-on backlog management responsibilities
• Experience in payments, POS, or fintech product domains
• Experience with Jira and Confluence for backlog management, workflow tracking, and d