Description
About WestEd
As a community of over 1,400 researchers, practitioners, consultants, and administrative professionals from all backgrounds and life experiences, we are committed to making a qualitative difference in the lives of youth, children, and adults. We conduct and apply research, develop evidence-based solutions, and provide consulting services across the country in both rural and urban communities to improve equitable outcomes for individuals from infancy through adulthood. Serving as trusted partners in the areas of education, health, and justice, our teams enhance capacity within communities and school districts to prioritize impact by asking the right questions, customizing methodologies, developing relevant tools, and implementing best practices specific to a diverse range of stakeholder needs.
Furthering diversity, equity, and inclusion is core to who we are and how we work. We are committed to working with our clients to illuminate and address disparities, value and elevate diverse voices, and ensure equitable access to our resources and services. Please review our Commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
SPECIAL NOTICE REGARDING THE WORK LOCATION OF THIS POSITION—Although WestEd provides the option of working at one of its facilities for employees, many roles allow employees to choose to work remotely for their own convenience. The decision to allow remote work at the employee's convenience is based on the requirements of the position or project in question.
Department Overview
WestEd’s Emerging Technologies Department is seeking a mission-driven Senior Data Product Owner. Our team provides technology solutions to serve our clients and internal staff. Our culture values communication, collaboration, accountability, and strong customer service skills. WestEd’s IT Department supports and deploys hardware, software, SaaS solutions, custom applications, data management, and network infrastructure for the agency’s clients and the agency as an enterprise. The successful candidate will be a critical member our new Data Analytics Consulting Practice team.
Position Overview
The Senior Data Product Owner for technologies and platforms supports the Data & Analytics Consulting Practice Manager in executing the data product strategy, vision, and roadmap. They work with clients to understand requirements, coordinate understanding across teams, and promote progress with best practices. Their primary focus is serving as the Data Engineering team's agile Product Owner, responsible for defining technology needs, outcomes, and roadmap to maximize alignment to business goals and strategies. This includes authoring stories and prioritizing the team backlog within sprints for all data engineering clients. Leverages product and people skills to align business strategy with technology deliverables. They collaborate with clients, partners, and internal stakeholders to understand product needs, assess the potential value in addressing those needs, and work cross-functionally to define, develop and deliver solutions. The Data Product Owner may take on additional responsibilities such as defining the content for product releases or full product manager responsibilities, including roadmap ownership, for a subset of the overall product. They may bring experience in a specific functional area such as software development, dashboard design, data engineering, or business analysis.
Principal Duties and Responsibilities
- Build, prioritize, and maintain a clear, comprehensive product backlog for data solutions products.
- Assist in Product, Practice, and client roadmap planning.
- Plan product release contents and timelines, drive execution to maximize the value shipped.
- Voice of Customer to the data engineering team, ensuring developers understand what to work on and why it is important.
- Analyze client/business requirements. Analyze business requirements provided by the client, translate them into functional requirements and construct comprehensive user requirements documentation. Function as a liaison among all stakeholders to facilitate an understanding of requirements.
- Validate software designs meet requirements. Leverage domain and product knowledge to help stakeholders understand operational / business trade-offs associated with customizations. Communicate product dependencies, system limitations changes and impact to client environment to assist with strategic planning. Collaborate with project and development teams to ensure requirements are clear and prerequisites are met. Manage requirements approval process with stakeholders.
- Review and validate test cases. Review design and test documents to verify that the design will meet the defined requirements.
- Improve systems by studying current practices and designing modifications.
- Set goals for the data engineering team and lead the team through the agile process, including planning, refinement, review, and sprints.
- Serve as the product expert supporting internal stakeholders.
- Perform any specific domain or functional responsibilities (e.g., diagram development).
Position Specifications
Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering and/or Business Administration
Preferred Education: Advanced degree, like Masters in Business Administration (MBA)
Experience, Skills & Qualifications:
- 10+ years of experience, or equivalent combination.
- 7+ years of experience as an agile product owner, leading development teams through planning, refinement, review, and sprint reviews, gathering and document requirements, researching / resolving issues and providing system production support.
- Dynamic, articulate, energetic and self-starter personality with demonstrated ability to translate product strategy and the product roadmap into executable development plans.
- Ability to interact professionally with executives, subject matter experts, business operations team members, technology professionals, software developers, and project managers.
- Results-driven individual with good business acumen; ability to understand the problem to be solved and deliver appropriate solutions that balances impact, effort, and alignment to objectives.
- Strong people skills to establish rapport, credibility, and influence with others across the company.
- Strong technical aptitude to learn, understand, and work with a variety of cloud and data technologies, APIs, databases, and visualization tools.
- Strong presentation and communication skills with an ability to simplify and clearly articulate concepts at all levels of the organization and across functions.
- Experience driving solutions from concept to delivery, working cross-functionally to define, design, develop, deliver, and iterate.
- Effective written, verbal, and listening communication skills.
- Self-Starter and able to work with minimum supervision and in the support of the data solutions team initiatives. Ability to coordinate people with a focus on deliverables.
- Experience with MS Office tools - Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
- Experience with Agile Project Management tools - JIRA, Azure DevOps, etc.
Preferences
*Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this position. Successful candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.
WestEd conducts a criminal background check and education verification for all new hires. Any offers of employment will be contingent on receiving a clear background check in accordance with applicable law.
SALARY AND BENEFITS:
The full salary range for this position, WestEd level 11, is $103,600 to $155,400 but WestEd does not typically hire at or near the top of the salary range. The typical hiring range for this role is $103,600 to $129,500. The actual offer takes into account multiple factors including but not limited to education; experience; internal equity, and other organizational needs.
In addition to the base salary, benefits include:
- 15% contribution toward retirement effective day 1 of employment
- Pre-tax Flexible Spending Accounts
- All health/welfare benefits are effective first of the month following hire date
- PTO: 3 weeks’ vacation (increases to 4 weeks beginning the 4th year of employment), paid holidays, and 12 days paid sick leave per year
- Life Insurance: value of 3x gross salary
- Opportunities for annual merit-based performance increases + annual incentives
- Professional development opportunities & mentorship program
For more detail about our benefits, go to: https://www.wested.org/work-at-wested/benefits/
Committed to the diversity of race, ethnicities, perspectives, and opportunities, WestEd offers a variety of social and professional learning communities, such as Employee Resource groups, the Data Intelligence, Insights, and Innovation PLC, and the WestEd Parent Community, just to name a few. We hope you’ll consider joining us to build better schools, communities, learning pathways, and more! WestEd is a Drug Free Employer and maintains a drug-free workplace. #LI-Remote
Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities
The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information. 41 CFR 60-1.35(c)