Senior Product Owner — Building Systems & Validation

ICON; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

ICON in Austin, TX seeks a Sr. Product Owner to own execution of the building product portfolio, including wall assemblies, enclosure performance, and design tools enabling 3D-printed homes to be permitted and built.

You turn direction into clearly defined work and maintain backlog discipline, ensuring done means done before release. The role collaborates with structures, enclosure, and building science leads, engineers, and other technology teams.

Qualifications

• 6+ years owning delivery of a technical product or portfolio with a track record of managing the sequence, schedule, and definition of done.
• Experience delivering complex, multi-team technical programs to committed schedules and managing risk.
• Ability to influence senior technical specialists to commitments through collaboration and leadership.
• Experience implementing or improving a development process across a team.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the accountable party to Department Leadership for timely and on-budget delivery of building products against their defined requirements and interfaces.
• Own and manage the product development execution process and backlog; keep the backlog honest and aligned with current product goals.
• Translate product direction into clearly scoped, actionable blocks of work for development teams and SMEs, with unambiguous definitions of done.
• Manage prioritization and sequencing of development work to align with business and product goals and keep the master schedule current.
• Coordinate with domain leads to ensure best practices are followed across the team.
• Coordinate validation efforts, manage consultants' schedules and budgets, and feed results back into the development record.
• Collaborate with product owners and counterparts in other departments to maintain system-level alignment.
• Route performance signals up to leadership and engineering, and ensure stakeholders are informed of changes.
• Record and monitor risks for the portfolio and escalate budget, schedule, and priority issues in time.
• Address scope creep and make real-time scope calls to stay aligned with current goals.

Education

Bachelor's degree in a technical or management discipline

Master's degree or equivalent

Job description

ICON is seeking a Sr. Product Owner to own execution of the building product portfolio: the wall assemblies, structural details, enclosure performance, and design tools that let a 3D-printed home be permitted, priced, and built anywhere. This role turns agreed product direction into clearly defined, correctly sequenced work, keeps the development backlog honest, and holds the line on what "done" requires before a product is released for use. This is product ownership for physical building products, where validation is bound by physical testing rather than a software iteration cycle.

This role sits within BPS's Product Development team, working day to day with the domain leads and engineers across structures, enclosure and building science, and design technology, and coordinating continuously with testing, software, hardware, material science, and build operations. The team is technically deep; several members are licensed engineers with primary authority in their domain. This role earns its standing by making their work easier to deliver, not by managing them. Product development at ICON is a matrix by design: coordination happens through credibility and follow-through. The problems are novel, the precedents are thin, and the development process this role runs is itself young, so landing it in daily practice is part of the first year of the job.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Serve as the accountable party to Department Leadership for timely and on-budget delivery of building products against their defined requirements and interfaces.
• Own and manage the product development execution process and backlog. Keep the backlog honest by clearing noise and stale items, and make sure everything open maps to a current product goal.
• Translate agreed product direction into clearly scoped, actionable blocks of work for product development teams and subject matter experts, written so the intent and the definition of done are unambiguous without a follow-up conversation.
• Manage prioritization and sequencing of development work to align with business and product goals, and keep the master schedule current across concurrent programs.
• Coordinate and consult with domain leads to ensure the development process is followed and best practices stay consistent across the team.
• Manage the validation effort as part of the development process: scope and manage consultants schedules and budgets against test and product deliverables, and carry results back into the development record.
• Coordinate and consult with product owners and product counterparts in other departments, including Software, Hardware, and other technology teams, to keep system-level requirements and interfaces aligned.
• Route field, build, and stakeholder signal on product performance upward to department leadership and to the relevant product development engineers.
• Ensure all affected functional disciplines are informed of changes and implementations that impact their function.
• Record, manage, and track risks for the product portfolio. Track real progress against commitment rather than reported progress, and proactively escalate budget, schedule, and priority issues to the department leadership while there is still time to act on them.
• Manage and address scope creep and requests that do not belong in the current cycle. Make real-time scope calls within agreed direction, and be comfortable saying no, or not now, to work that does not serve a current goal.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• 6+ years owning delivery of a technical product, standard, or portfolio, with 4 or more acceptable alongside a relevant Master's degree. Relevant pathways include product ownership, technical program management, new product development, technical architectural practice, and multi-site prototype or rollout program management. The title you held matters less than whether you owned the sequence, the schedule, and the definition of done.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical or management discipline, or equivalent demonstrated experience. The technical fluency this role requires is more often built through work in engineering, construction, or manufacturing environments than through a specific degree.
• Demonstrated ownership of a live portfolio that kept evolving after release: a backlog, program plan, new product development pipeline, prototype or design standard under revision control, or whatever your organization called it. What matters is that you decided what entered it, what left it, and in what order. A single project that closed out, or coordination without that ownership, does not meet the bar.
• A track record delivering complex, multi-team technical programs to committed schedules, including responsibility for surfacing and managing risk.
• Experience holding senior technical specialists who did not report to you to their commitments through influence.
• Experience introducing or materially changing a development process for a team that did not previously use one, including securing adoption from people who were not required to comply.
• Experience holding a development or program budget, including tracking committed versus actual spend on external vendor and consulting engagements.
• Proficiency with a work management platform and the judgment to use it proportionately rather than ceremonially.

PREFERRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:

• 8+ years of relevant experience.
• Experience in construction, building products, architecture and engineering practice, or another physical-product industry where validation is bound by physical testing rather than software iteration cycles.
• Experience owning a stage gate or phase gate development process, including gate review facilitation and exit criteria enforcement.
• Experience scoping and coordinating physical validation with internal or third-party groups, including performance mockup programs, specialty testing, or product qualification campaigns.
• Experience owning a versioned prototype, design standard, or kit of parts deployed across many sites or projects, including change control and communicating revisions to the functions that consume them.
• Background bridging software and physical product development, including sequencing digital deliverables against hardware or field milestones.
• Familiarity with 3D-printed construction, advanced manufacturing, prefabrication, or digital fabrication workflows.
• Familiarity with building codes and product certification pathways at the level needed to scope and flag, not to adjudicate.

ICON is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an innovative, inclusive, diverse and discrimination-free work environment. Employment with ICON is based on merit, competence, and qualifications. It is our policy to administer all personnel actions, including recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting employees, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin or ancestry, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, or any other legally protected classification in accordance with applicable federal and state laws. Consistent with the obligations of these laws, ICON will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

Furthermore, as a federal government contractor, the Company maintains an affirmative action program which furthers its commitment and complies with recordkeeping and reporting requirements under certain federal civil rights laws and regulations, including Executive Order 11246, Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (as amended) and the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 (as amended).

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit candidates through this application. ICON does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency submissions for candidates and will not pay fees to any third-party agency without a prior agreement with ICON.

As part of our compliance with these obligations, the Company invites you to voluntarily self-identify as set forth below. Provision of such information is entirely voluntary and a decision to provide or not provide such information will not have any effect on your employment or subject you to any adverse treatment. Any and all information provided will be considered confidential, will be kept separate from your application and/or personnel file, and will only be used in accordance with applicable laws, orders and regulations, including those that require the information to be summarized and reported to the federal government for civil rights enforcement purposes.

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