Product Owner

Product Owner

Position Description

RAND has an exciting opportunity for a product owner to join our Product Design group within the Communications and External Affairs (CEA) department. The Product Design group creates products that help make RAND research and people more accessible to a broad audience through storytelling and design.

In this role, you will work collaboratively across teams and departments to drive innovation for internal applications and external products. You will have primary responsibility for enhancing our workflow management tool, Adobe Workfront, our content management system, Adobe Experience Manager, and the external website that these products ultimately serve, rand.org. You will be expected to understand these systems and their underlying technology, the business rules implemented in them, and the needs of CEA business owners, stakeholders, and end users.

As a product owner, you will be an empowered advocate for CEA product requests. You will set the priorities for fixes and enhancements for these systems, and work with engineering and design to ensure timelines and milestones are being met. You will be the point person for answering functional and implementation questions and be a bridge between CEA and engineering to ensure that sub teams within and across departments are aligned and working as a coordinated group.

The ideal candidate will thrive on solving problems in a web-focused, technical environment. Success in this role will be measured by improved internal user experiences of our applications and enhanced impact of our external research products and website. This will help deliver RAND's objective, mission-driven work into the hands of decisionmakers and influencers in the public policy space.

Duties include but are not limited to:

• Work with CEA management to define product vision and strategy.

• Track and understand stakeholder and end user needs, and map these to the strategy including pitching ideas for product improvements.

• Develop product roadmaps outlining feature prioritization, milestones, and timelines.

• Translate feature requests into tasks for engineering. Collaborate with business analysts to break down goals into tactics. Help set appropriate deadlines and drive towards meeting them.

• Manage the product backlog by prioritizing CEA's priorities for engineers and stakeholders.

• On a day-to-day basis, be accessible to engineers, business analysts, and other stakeholders to answer questions. Quickly connect with CEA management and contributors as needed to make decisions and clear roadblocks to development.

• Serve as product ambassador within the organization, sharing knowledge and answering questions.

• Stay current in newtrends and best practices for agile project management.

Qualifications

The successful candidate is required to possess the following:

• Minimum of 3 years relevant experience in product development or related environment.

• Familiarity with agile methodology.

• Understanding of business value related to features and functions.

• Experience with workflow management tools, like Jira or Workfront.

• Experience with digital asset management systems, like Adobe Experience Manager.

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical decisions to non-technical audiences.

• Demonstrated ability to juggle multiple tasks while maintaining an excellent attention to detail.

• Sharp analytical and problem-solving skills.

• Ability to effectively manage conflicting needs of stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Agile certification-product owner or scrum master.

• Familiarity with user-centered design, accessibility standards, and digital best practices.

• Experience with digital editorial and print production workflows and processes.

• Knowledge of design tools like Adobe Creative Suite and Figma.