Product Owner (Energy/Utility Interconnection Software)

About the Role

This position starts by reporting to the Director of Product Management and will be a core member of the portfolio team, coordinating day-to-day with another product owner on GridUnity’s portfolio of technology products. You help set the vision for the solution and then keep stakeholders aligned around the vision, the strategy for realizing this vision, and representing customers’ needs and product approach to the engineering team. With successful delivery in your role, your responsibilities may evolve to leading a product vertical with allocated product team members.

You ensure the engineering team maintains a clear understanding of the prioritized product backlog and goals for each product increment, which is delivered through iterative Agile development. You will act as a member of the Agile development team by specifying product requirements, planning development iterations, reviewing development progress, and accepting deliverables for release to customers. The Product Owner works with others on the larger GridUnity product and customer growth teams to understand and monitor changing customer needs. You also track ongoing product metrics to ensure customer value is maximized and product investment decisions are data-driven.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Discovery

• Drive the translation of company/product strategy into a prioritized, outcome-based roadmap for GridUnity products, including synthesizing GridUnity’s current customer needs for the solution area and placing them onto a delivery roadmap.
• Engage with customers to understand needs, test and validate concepts, and continuously validate that the backlog reflects real customer and market problems.
• Evaluate product enhancements to drive selection of those with extensible and/or specific strategic value, including driving build/buy/partner and sequencing tradeoffs.

Backlog & Requirements

• Drive and share grooming of the product backlog with other Product Owners so engineering always has a clear, well-specified next set of work.
• Write and refine user stories, acceptance criteria, and edge cases that hold up under implementation.
• Balance technical debt, new features, and bug fixes within a single prioritized queue.
• Make fast, defensible prioritization calls when priorities conflict.

Delivery & Execution

• Lead product solutioning in coordination with customer success, product design, and other team members to deliver customer needs with scalable, localized product.
• Act as the go-to decision-maker for the development team on scope, sequencing, and acceptance.
• Unblock engineering quickly when requirements are ambiguous or priorities shift mid-sprint.
• Manage scope creep during a release without derailing the sprint or quarter's commitments.
• Own release readiness — confirm feature solves for the defined need before it ships.
• Provide subject matter expertise and support as needed to GridUnity sales team (e.g., RFP support, product demonstrations, product training, documentation, etc.).

Stakeholder & Cross-Functional Management

• Represent the voice of the customer/market to engineering, and represent engineering constraints back to the business.
• Manage competing stakeholder demands (sales, customer success, executives, engineering) without becoming a bottleneck or a pushover.
• Keep leadership and stakeholders informed on status, risk, and tradeoffs through concise, structured communication that includes any needed context.
• Build trust with engineering and stakeholders that difficult prioritization calls are respected.

Customer & Insights

• Define what success looks like for a feature or initiative before it's built, and measure it after.
• Get close enough to customers/users to spot unmet needs before product ships.
• Synthesize qualitative feedback and quantitative usage data into a coherent view of what to build.
• Report on product area health (adoption, satisfaction, delivery predictability) in terms leadership cares about; course-correct or kill initiatives that aren't delivering value.
• Validate assumptions efficiently (prototypes, pilots, spikes) before committing engineering time.

Team & Process Leadership

• Mentor or set the bar for less experienced product owners, bringing best practices and continuous improvement into the Product Team’s overall way of working.
• Collaborate with the Director of Product Management to improve the team's product development process itself (ceremonies, definition of ready/done, estimation).
• Operate with autonomy and comfort with ambiguity commensurate with a senior-level product owner.

Qualifications

• 7+ years experience in B2B SaaS software organization(s), with 4+ years experience working in a Product Owner role.
• Energy/utility industry experience and knowledge is required, including experience in transmission planning and/or interconnection processes; experience in a utility, ISO/RTO, or developer with utility-scale project development is a plus.
• Skilled in both written and verbal communication with the ability to transition seamlessly between technical and business content areas.
• Experienced in communicating effectively with executive-level stakeholders, identifying, synthesizing, and proposing risk-mitigation and opportunity-securing pathways.
• In-depth understanding of and experience with Agile software development methodology.
• Highly organized with ability to stay on top of multiple projects, teams, and deliverables.
• Ability to adapt to changing internal and external priorities.

Education

• Undergraduate degree in STEM field, or equivalent experience is preferred.
• Professional Engineer in Power Systems is preferred.