Date Opened: May 25, 2023 Location: IN Company: Allstate Insurance Company

Allstate Benefits is one of America?s leading voluntary, supplemental benefit providers. Founded in 1956 as American Heritage Life Insurance Company and acquired by The Allstate Corporation in 1999, we have the strength of a nationally recognized and trusted brand behind our comprehensive and competitive product portfolio. All products are underwritten by American Heritage Life Insurance Company, a subsidiary of The Allstate Corporation. Our home office is in Jacksonville, Florida. More than 31,000 companies across the U.S. choose to put our products to work for them, protecting their most valuable assets ? their employees. Allstate Benefit Technology's mission is to enable Allstate Benefits with product technology capabilities that outpace the competition and provides best-in-class service to our customers. As a leading provider of supplemental insurance, we're committed to delivering superior products and services with cutting edge technology, exceptional customer service and compassionate claims administration. With over 40,000 groups in force and insuring more than three million employees, we uphold the Good Hands? promise every day. We are seeking a Junior Product Owner (C1) to support technology transformation on Allstate Voluntarily Benefits Business. The ideal candidate must have prior business analyst or product owner experience. This individual will demonstrate knowledge and experience in Agile principles. As Product Owner, you will learn the systems, work with business product owners, gather feature requirements, create roadmap, coordinate sprints and work with technical team. You should be able to work with cross-functional teams to manage product releases. Someone who is truly customer obsessed and dedicated, while looking for opportunities to innovate and take thoughtful risk in order to get things done better and faster.

Job Responsibilities

• Define and communicate customer needs. Engage proactively with business product owners to better understand their needs. Represent the customer?s voice to help the squad members with real-time feedback from customers and their stakeholders.
• The candidate will work with Infrastructure team, development teams, other support teams, and drive efficient planning and execution.
• Engage with internal stakeholders. Ensure organizational alignment of the squad?s mission and activities. Remove blockers that prevent progress.
• Support and enable the squad. Regularly engage with the squad to offer feedback on work in progress, clarify requirements and answer questions.
• Maintain and prioritize backlog. Refine backlog to ensure squad has the right direction to deliver business value consistently
• Prioritize work through a well-groomed backlog of user stories and clearly communicate what needs to be done and by when. Define and communicate acceptance criteria based on business & customer needs
• Promote Agile working style. Foster a culture of continuous learning and development
• Participate in Agile ceremonies. Daily standups, Retrospectives
• Facilitate Agile ceremonies. Backlog refinement, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review/Demo
• Leads the scrum team as the decision maker for scope, prioritization, and acceptance of delivery, ultimately responsible for driving collaboration and ensuring that the backlog delivered is aligned to customer and strategic goals
• Builds, edits, and maintains the team backlog, defined in the context of the target platform?s out of the box capabilities and vision
• Prioritizes backlog items based on user value, time, and dependencies
• Defines user stories and provides the platform specific clarifications necessary to assist the team with their story estimates and sequencing
• Accepts user stories that have completed all testing (including user acceptance)
• Incorporates input from the system architect/engineering and other stakeholders into the team level backlog
• Maintains customer needs, validates solutions, and improves user experiences through partnership with user experience (UX) strategist to assess trade-offs and incorporate UX designs in features while balancing short/long term needs
• Prepares for and participates in Program Increment (PI) Planning
• Drafts the team?s specific objectives for the upcoming PI
• Reviews and contributes to program vision, roadmap, and content presentations
• Owns the launch and release plans, collaborating with Chief Product Owner (CPO) and leadership to ensure proper prioritization of product features
• Leads Sprint Planning and Backlog Refinement sessions to ensure stories are ready for development, including coordination of inter/intra-team dependencies
• Leads demos of team?s working software (in program-wide System Demos)
• Responsible for the backlogs of 1-2 agile teams
  

Primary Skills

Skills Required:

• The ideal candidate for this position will have at least 7 years of total experience, with an ability to think tactically as well as strategically while coordinating with cross functional teams in a matrixed environment.
• 3-5 years serving as an Agile Product Owner or business analysts, within high performing, cross functional teams.
• 2-3 years of experience in insurance industry is MUST.
• Collaboration across technology organization, providing sound business analysis, process and change leadership within a maturing, Agile PDLC framework
• Individual with high-level perspective to define goals and create a vision for development projects.
• Demonstrated capabilities in successfully leading enterprise-wide programs and projects.
• High degree of business acumen and technical competency; ability to balance and bridge technology and business needs; project and program management.
• Leadership skills in building team from the scratch and leading them effectively
• Working with infrastructure delivery and support teams to ensure a smooth transition of new capability into production.
• Self-motivated with exceptional oral and written communication skills, ability to communicate clearly and concisely
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously and to resolve scheduling and other conflicts in order to meet all deadlines.
• Develop and continually revise (in partnership with other teams where necessary) suitable processes and guidelines to ensure appropriate application development standards are available to guide all the participant teams.
• Experience in working with agile lifecycle and/or tracking and process management tools, e.g., JIRA
• Good experience in product management tools like Mural, including Microsoft Project, Access, Word, Excel, Visio, and SharePoint.
• Exceptional people management skills ? able to work with all levels within their portfolio
• Ability to learn technical concepts quickly
• Technical knowledge of programming languages (Java and Python etc.) in order to lead the team towards the right solutions and improvements.
• Knowledge of end-to-end product development concepts including risk, audit, controls, and legal and compliance
• Accountability for each stage of the development process and final product.

Skills Desired:

• Knowledge of Insurance industry.
• Experience in working on Technology projects related to Insurance domain.
• Formal Agile Product Owner training.
• Technology experience is preferred.
• Kanban is also a plus.

Experience

• Minimum 6-8+ years of Product owner experience Software development experience (SDLC)
• Good understanding of insurance concepts and work experience in group term insurance space.
• 4+ Experience managing product development deliverables
• Min 4 years? experience in Leading the Team
• Experience in Project management experience
• Experience in Release management experience
• Experience Automation and Manual deployments
• Experience developing continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipelines for distributed apps.
• Experience with Groovy, Git, and Jenkins is a plus.

Shift Timing

• 13:00 - 21:30 PM for overlap with onsite business partner