Product Owner - Packaging Technology
First seen by Alion on Nov 13, 2026.
Job purpose:
The Product Owner is the execution arm of the product team and is accountable for translating product direction, roadmap initiatives, and customer needs into clearly defined, prioritised, and deliverable work for Agile development teams.
The role owns the product backlog and sprint-level execution, ensuring that development teams understand what needs to be built, why it matters, and how successful delivery will be validated.
Core responsibilities:
Product Backlog and Prioritization:
- Own, maintain, groom, and prioritise the product backlog, ensuring alignment with product goals, customer needs, business value, and delivery dependencies.
- Lead backlog refinement and ensure items are clearly defined, appropriately sized, prioritised, and ready for development.
- Assess feature requests, enhancements, defects, and competing demands; recommend sequencing and trade-offs in collaboration with the Product Manager.
Requirements and User Stories:
- Translate roadmap initiatives and customer or business needs into epics, user stories, workflows, business rules, and clear acceptance criteria.
- Break down complex initiatives into manageable increments that can be delivered and validated through Agile sprints.
- Clarify functional behaviour, use cases, edge cases, and dependencies for Engineering and QA.
- Review completed work against acceptance criteria and confirm whether the agreed requirements have been met.
Agile Delivery and Team Enablement:
- Work as the product domain expert and primary point of contact for the development team on backlog scope and requirement clarification.
- Participate actively in sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives, and other relevant Agile ceremonies; support the team in maintaining sprint-level momentum.
- Monitor sprint goals, backlog readiness, scope changes, and cross-team dependencies, escalating risks through the appropriate channels.
- Partner with Engineering and QA to support feature validation, quality, and delivery against agreed priorities.
Customer and Stakeholder Collaboration:
- Work with Product Managers and relevant customer-facing teams to understand customer feedback and translate it into actionable product backlog items.
- Drive early feedback on new features and incorporate validated insights into backlog refinement and prioritization.
- Communicate priorities, scope decisions, requirement changes, and delivery expectations clearly to cross-functional stakeholders.
- Build alignment where stakeholders have competing needs, using product priorities and customer value to guide recommendations.
Continuous Improvement and Senior-Level Contribution:
- Identify opportunities to improve story quality, backlog health, team collaboration, and product delivery practices.
- Use delivery and quality feedback to identify recurring requirement gaps, reduce avoidable rework, and improve sprint readiness.
- Share product domain knowledge and provide guidance or mentorship to less experienced Product Owners and team members, where applicable.
Role Focus and Responsibility Boundaries:
- Maintain focus on product backlog ownership, requirement clarity, and sprint-level product execution in alignment with the Product Manager/CPO.
- Tier 2 support and technical triage are owned by Support/DevOps teams; project management and Scrum Master responsibilities by Delivery roles; customer demos and training by Enablement/Presales; and code contribution by Development teams.
- Other duties as assigned.
Required experience and skills:
- 8+ years of experience in Product Ownership, product delivery, software product development, or a closely related role, with substantial hands-on Product Owner experience.
- Mandatory: Relevant experience in the Packaging industry/domain, with specific exposure to CLF (Cartons, Labels & Flexibles).
- Understanding of packaging workflows, products, and industry-specific business processes is strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated experience owning and prioritizing product backlogs for software products, ideally within a global SaaS or enterprise software environment.
- Strong capability in writing epics and detailed user stories, defining measurable acceptance criteria, and translating customer needs and roadmap initiatives into development-ready work.
- Proven experience working with Agile/Scrum development teams and contributing effectively to sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
- Ability to prioritize competing requirements by considering customer impact, business value, product priorities, effort, and dependencies.
- Experience working closely with Product Managers, developers, QA, Support, Implementation, and other cross-functional stakeholders.
- Strong understanding of software development lifecycle, Agile delivery practices, and product quality/acceptance processes.
- Ability to act as a domain expert for delivery teams, resolve requirement ambiguity, facilitate decisions, and communicate scope and priority changes effectively.
- Experience with JIRA and familiarity with Confluence, Agile boards, backlog tools, and customer feedback tools.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, facilitation, organization, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Ability to work independently in a fast-paced, globally distributed SaaS business.
- Experience mentoring colleagues or improving product ownership practices is an advantage.
- Business-level English proficiency (written and verbal) required.
Skills
IT Product Management, Product Roadmap, IT Business Analyst, IT Product Development