Job Description
About Us
At SoCalGas, we believe that every Californian deserves a resilient energy future. We are working to achieve that future by empowering California to reach its sustainability goals through innovation, collaboration, and decarbonization. As our states energy needs change, we will be there providing reliable energy that is clean, safe, and affordable to our 22 million customers.
In addition to helping shape the future of hydrogen technology and clean energy, as an employee of SoCalGas youll also enjoy an aggressive total compensation plan, multiple upward mobility opportunities and the ability to find a true work life balance. We also strive to reflect the communities we serve by attracting top talent and maintaining a diverse workforce. To discover more about how rewarding it is to work here, we invite you to visit these pages on our website: Our Mission; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Sustainability, In the Community, and Employee Benefits. Join SoCalGas today to share in our mission to build the cleanest, safest, and most innovative energy company in America!
Primary Purpose
The Product Owner Team Lead is a member of an agile team, primarily responsible for defining user stories [i.e., a short description of a unit of work to be delivered within an agile sprint, detailing the desired system or software functionality written in the user’s language] and prioritizing backlog of user stories based on value for customer. Has frequent customer-facing interactions to draft objectives and strategies and drive innovation through products or services.
As a team lead and representative of the delivery team, navigates increasingly complex IT and Business environments with more cross-team or external dependencies [i.e., reliance and interrelatedness with other systems, applications, platforms, and workstreams which result in a more challenging product to manage due to the additional risk], including people, process and technology, and stakeholder interest for a more complex product or capability. They maximize business value within a product or capability, ensuring the team focuses on a mix of net new development, improvement, support, and innovation.
As a supervisor, provides oversight to members of agile teams, helping to ensure that agile teams are prioritizing work effectively, and managing their delivery sprints to meet expectations.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Captures and documents user stories to inform priority and sprint planning. As the owner of a more complex product, may capture stories from multiple stakeholders, and take in stores from other teams. Defines stories and features according to quality standards for clarity. Acts as a trusted advisor and liaison between the team and its stakeholders. Proactively aligns with business partners to understand business value resulting in a clear sprint plan and priority. Collaborates across product teams to ensure that cross-team dependencies are understood and managed. Communicates the value of complex stories to the scrum team and ensures user stories are well-formed with clear acceptance criteria. Manages team sprint plan and a healthy backlog, a list of prioritized work that is well defined and ready to be delivered within a two-week sprint.
- Defines and communicates the teams roadmap and vision for a 3-6 month time horizon. Manages complex business needs, relationships, and more complex products, with full authority. Identifies and qualifies potential opportunities with the business clients for the backlog. focusing on quarterly planning. Ensures that the value delivered is measurable. Drives communication of product’s roadmap with an eye towards continuous innovation and improvement. Proactively champions new delivery opportunities.
- Maintains a healthy backlog of work for the team, focused on business value. Engages with business stakeholders to understand their needs. Drives prioritization of work items to focus on business value delivered, balancing net new development opportunities against innovation, improvement and product support. Understands and communicates the value of the user stories. Drives demos and creates feedback loops between the team and their stakeholders/clients. Provides feedback to the team on the work completed. Reviews and accepts user stories and features as completed, ensuring that they have met all acceptance criteria and the needs of the end-user.
- Prepares for and participates in agile ceremonies. Writes features and creates a quarterly plan for a more complex product. Partners with other Product Owners to plan around dependencies and resolve impediments. Participates in planning activities across the enterprise, including group-level planning activities that involve the work of multiple agile teams, such as quarterly planning or program increment (PI) planning. Participates in group events to review outputs and progress across teams. Writes features [i.e., a grouping of work defined in an agile way and made up of individual units of work that can be performed within a two-week sprint] and creates a quarterly plan for a more complex product.
- Acts as direct supervisor to a team of employees. Holds responsibility for performance management activities, addressing staffing needs, people-related administrative activities, managing employee relations, and other people management duties as required. Supports team members in their individual development and continuous improvement, including goal setting and training plans.
- Performs other duties as assigned (no more than 5% of duties).
$122500 – $183800
Education
- Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Business Administration, related field or equivalent training and/or experience. Required
Experience
- 8 years – Related work experience in Project or Product Delivery, Product Management, IT and / or Business Operations or equivalent experience. Required
- 3 years – Related experience as a senior contributor, lead, project manager, and/or supervisor or equivalent position. Preferred
- 3 years – Experience in operating in a large-scale Agile environment, SAFe, or Less Preferred
- 2 years – Experience working in the energy sector or with a utility. Preferred
- 2 years – Data Management framework experience, Data Mesh or Data Fabrics. Preferred
- 1 year – Data governance platform experience, Collibra, Informatica, Info Steward, AWS DataZone, or AWS Glue Catalog. Preferred
Skills and Abilities
Required:
- Stakeholder Management – Ability to create and maintain strong relationships with stakeholders (including clients) in order to drive outcomes and create alignment around a vision or course of action. Advanced
- Adaptability and Learning Agility – Ability to learn, adapt, unlearn, and relearn to rapidly adapt to changing business needs, processes, standards, and tools; a strong ability to prioritize and reprioritize work. Advanced
- Product Management – Strong product management skills, including an ability to communicate and inspire product vision, strategy and roadmap, apply unique business insights, prioritize work to be completed, and make sound decisions aligned to business goals. Intermediate
- Value Realization – Strong ability to identify the benefits provided by a proposed user story or feature relative to the effort that it will require from the team in order to drive the effective prioritization of work to maximize the benefits delivered by the team to the customer. Advanced
Preferred:
- Cloud Technologies: AWS, Azure, or Google.
- Ability to coach and mentor people.
- Agile Methodologies – Knowledge of concepts, including Agile Scrum and/or Kanban, and application of Agile methodology (e.g., Lean, SAFe, LeSS) for project management to be able to design, implement and manage projects. Intermediate
- User Experience – Strong understanding of how users will interact with systems, applications, and products, with an ability to design applications and interfaces that are consumable and easy to navigate. Advanced
- Automation and Security Concepts – Knowledge of Automation and Security Concepts (e.g., test automation, code coverage, DevSecOps, CI/CD pipelines, etc.). Intermediate
- Agile Tools – Knowledge of Agile Tools, such as Azure, Jira, etc. Intermediate
Licenses and Certifications
- Agile Scrum, Product Owner or Scrum Master certifications such as Certified Product Owner Certification or Certified Scrum Master Certification. Preferred
Other Qualifications
- May require work outside of normal business hours and/or 24/7 response availability for system and application maintenance, enhancements, production releases and/or operational emergencies.
Benefits
SoCalGas offers a comprehensive benefits program to help support employees both personally and professionally. These benefits include, but are not limited to:
- Competitive pay & Annual Bonus program
- Medical, dental, and vision packages (plus free Mental Health resources/sessions)
- 401K company match & Company provided Pension Plan
- Work/Life Balance including generous PTO
- Wellness Programs/Classes
- Tuition/Education Reimbursement
- Career Development Tools & Resources through SoCalGas University
Equal Opportunity Employer Minorities/Women/Protected Veterans/Disabled