Product Owner 5

Role: Product Owner 5
Location: Chicago, IL
Work Model: Hybrid – currently 2 days/week in office; may increase to more days in the future
Pay Rate: $70 - 76/hr on W2

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About The AES Group
The AES Group is a premier technology and engineering consulting company that has been bringing businesses and talent together for over 20 years to deliver innovative solutions that have the greatest positive impact on society. AES has helped over 40 business enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, engage their customers, empower their employees, and transform their business operations with the power of cloud, data, AI, engineering, and other emerging technologies.

Position Overview:

One of our clients is seeking a Lead Product Owner to support customers and field service teams throughout product implementation, customization, integration, issue resolution, and ongoing product support.

This role partners closely with product development engineers, field support specialists, customers, testing teams, and internal stakeholders to identify product issues, coordinate solutions, manage requirements and software changes, and improve product adoption and customer experience.

Why Consider This Opportunity?

• Newly created position with direct impact on the product organization.
• Work closely with customers, engineering teams, field service teams, and business stakeholders.
• Lead product implementation, customization, requirements, change management, and UAT initiatives.
• Influence product improvements through direct customer and field feedback.
• Hybrid work environment with 2 days per week in the Chicago office.
• Monday–Friday, 1st shift schedule.
• 0–25% potential travel.

Key Responsibilities:

• Partner with product development engineers to track and communicate design, development, support, maintenance, and product issues.
• Identify, document, prioritize, and report design, reliability, maintenance issues, and software defects.
• Gather, analyze, and consolidate feedback from customers and field service teams.
• Coordinate with customers and field support specialists to resolve product issues and increase product adoption.
• Address customer and field support questions involving product integration, infrastructure, and technical functionality.
• Support product implementations, installations, customizations, and integration activities.
• Manage software change requests from customers, vendors, development teams, and internal stakeholders.
• Track software problems through resolution, including documentation, escalation, status reporting, and customer communication.
• Gather, document, maintain, and prioritize functional product requirements.
• Provide recommendations based on business needs, customer feedback, product capabilities, and stakeholder priorities.
• Support major product installations, implementations, and customization initiatives.
• Participate in User Acceptance Testing (UAT), including acceptance criteria, test strategies, test plans, and testing approaches.
• Collaborate across product, engineering, development, testing, field support, customer, and business teams.
• Facilitate clear communication between technical teams and business stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in a Lead Product Owner or senior Product Owner role.
• Bachelor's degree preferred but not required.
• Strong business analysis experience, including identifying business needs and recommending solutions that deliver measurable stakeholder value.
• Strong decision-making, analytical, problem-solving, and critical-thinking capabilities.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, influencing, and stakeholder-management skills.
• Extensive experience managing and coordinating software change requests.
• Working knowledge of software engineering, software development methodologies, software design practices, and product integration.
• Experience with software problem management, issue tracking, escalation, resolution, and customer communication.
• Strong software product business knowledge, including product requirements, product vision, customer usage, installations, and customizations.
• Extensive experience with User Acceptance Testing (UAT), including acceptance criteria, test planning, test strategies, testing environments, and end-user involvement.
• Ability to work effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders across the organization.

Core Competencies:

Business Analysis

• Analyze business functions, needs, priorities, and value.
• Establish prerequisites and appropriate approaches for business analysis.
• Collaborate with stakeholders, development teams, and testing teams.
• Document business cases, requirements, timelines, dependencies, and resources.
• Apply appropriate business analysis methodologies, frameworks, and tools.

Decision Making & Critical Thinking

• Evaluate assumptions, alternatives, risks, and historical decisions.
• Assess potential business and technical impacts of decisions.
• Analyze and synthesize complex information to support recommendations.
• Advise stakeholders on alternatives, trade-offs, and recommended solutions.
• Apply consultative, consensus-driven, or situational decision-making approaches.

Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Communicate effectively with technical, business, customer, and field service audiences.
• Adapt presentations, requirements, documentation, and communication to the intended audience.
• Engage and influence stakeholders at multiple organizational levels.
• Facilitate alignment between customers, engineering, development, testing, and business teams.
• Communicate complex technical and product information clearly and effectively.

Software Change Request Management

• Estimate costs, resources, timelines, and impacts associated with change requests.
• Define appropriate responses to non-standard or unsupported requests.
• Develop and maintain change-request processes, documentation, and templates.
• Evaluate affected components, risks, resources, costs, dependencies, and implementation status.
• Manage the end-to-end software change-request process.
• Research and apply tools and techniques for monitoring product effectiveness.

Software Engineering & Product Integration

• Understand product integration across multiple platforms, applications, and systems.
• Work with software packages, components, interfaces, and integrated product environments.
• Understand software development methodologies, activities, deliverables, and lifecycle processes.
• Develop and maintain structured feature, functional, planning, and scheduling documentation.
• Apply knowledge of software design practices, technologies, and development processes.

Software Problem Management

• Track, analyze, prioritize, and support resolution of software and product issues.
• Document resolution progress and communicate status to customers and stakeholders.
• Coordinate issues involving other products, platforms, teams, or vendors.
• Follow established problem-reporting, resolution, notification, and escalation procedures.
• Maintain clear issue documentation throughout the resolution lifecycle.

Software Product Business Knowledge

• Manage product requirements, current product usage, future plans, and product vision.
• Collect, analyze, maintain, and communicate functional requirements.
• Support product implementations, installations, integrations, and customizations.
• Maintain knowledge of customer usage patterns, needs, feedback, and product experience.
• Understand advanced product features, functions, capabilities, and business applications.
• Identify opportunities, challenges, and innovative or non-traditional product use cases.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

• Develop and evaluate effective user acceptance testing approaches.
• Review UAT plans for completeness, coverage, and appropriateness.
• Define acceptance testing strategies, approaches, and measurable criteria.
• Partner with end users to establish testing environments and acceptance criteria.
• Support acceptance testing throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Consult with stakeholders on UAT strategies, processes, plans, and execution.

Work Environment:

• Hybrid work model
• Currently 2 days per week in the Chicago office
• Office requirements may increase in the future
• Monday–Friday, 1st shift
• 0–25% potential travel

Interview Process:

The interview process consists of 3 rounds via Microsoft Teams with video ON:

1. Technical Interview – Coding
2. Technical Interview – Architecture
3. Team Interview – Behavioral

The final interview round may be conducted in the office.