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The Associate Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the product's value and the agile team's work by ensuring the team’s backlog is prioritized and aligned with customer needs and approved business cases. They build strong partnerships with stakeholders through continuous communication and feedback to ensure their needs are represented, and the product outcomes are achieved. They develop and convey the product’s vision to the agile team, outlining and prioritizing work based on business value realization metrics.
This opportunity has one opening and will support the Pharmacy - Operational Efficiency product team. Success in this role will require strong cross-functional collaboration and strategic partnerships across the organization. The role will work closely with various business and agile teams and will need to effectively collaborate, build consensus, and drive initiatives with key support teams across multiple departments, as well as partner with various Product teams and ARTs. The ideal candidate will prioritize high-value work and align with our program's performance objectives to maximize impact and efficiency.
This position will work a hybrid schedule of at least 3 days (Tues-Thurs) in Wellmark’s Des Moines office with 2 days remote option (Mon/Fri).
Associate Product Owner Level
Required Qualifications - Must have:
Preferred Qualifications - Great to have:
Product Owner Level
Required Qualifications - Must have:
Preferred Qualifications - Great to have:
What you will do:
a. Maximize the value of the product and the work of the agile team by working with the team to ensure that they have a clear vision of the priority and value of the work.
b. Act as a strong, informal, dotted-line leader and mentor to the agile team through effective two-way communication, helping employees learn new skills, identifying and managing resistance, and being an advocate.
c. Serve as the voice of the customer by creating a shared understanding of the product vision and customer needs through consistent communications with the team.
d. Active leader in the agile team’s scrum events, including agile ceremonies such as stand-ups, story refinements, backlog grooming, and team retrospectives.
e. Lead iteration review meetings to demonstrate the outcomes achieved to the product team’s stakeholders or customers.
f. Ensure the team understands the product priorities and executes the highest value work through lean and agile product prioritization methods (e.g, WSJF, MoSCoW).
g. Obtain insights, prioritize, and balance multiple stakeholder priorities, and synthesize complex information, to maintain product team alignment with the vision.
h. Partner with stakeholders and customers to curate the product vision, product stack, and features to ensure that the next increment of value is executed.
i. Author the product roadmap features by creating well-defined product requirements, including features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
j. Partner with stakeholders to assess value and prioritize features and stories to ensure work focuses on those with a maximum value aligned to the product strategy.
k. Manage against and participate in the refinement of Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s) defined for the product team during each planning interval.
l. Evaluate progress at the end of each iteration, including the ability to define Minimum Viable Products (MVP).
m. Seek quantitative and qualitative information to comprehensively understand where the product team’s solutions are not optimizing value.
n. Apply change management practices and tools in pre-planning and planning (features and user stories) to ensure impacted stakeholders and employees are prepared and equipped to adopt changes; consult with the Change Practitioner supporting Agile Release Train (ART) to monitor change readiness and adoption across the ART.
o. Understand the impact the assigned product has on the customer and work collaboratively to ensure any change is properly managed.
p. Obtain objective insights through research and analytics to analyze how a customer of the product is adopting, consuming, and benefiting from the product features.
q. Other duties as assigned.
An Equal Opportunity Employer
The policy of Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is to recruit, hire, train and promote individuals in all job classifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by law.
Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability at any stage of the employment application process should contact us at careers@wellmark.com
Please inform us if you meet the definition of a "Covered DoD official".
At this time, Wellmark is not considering applicants for this position that require any type of immigration sponsorship (additional work authorization or permanent work authorization) now or in the future to work in the United States. This includes, but IS NOT LIMITED TO: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, L-1, J-1, etc. For additional information around work authorization needs please refer to the following resources:Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants
Wellmark supports and expects the responsible use of AI for our workforce! We welcome the responsible use of these tools by job seekers as well and are interested in learning from you; you will have an opportunity in the application process to share which tools you used and how you applied them.
