Product Owner

You are as unique as your background, experience and point of view. Here, you’ll be encouraged, empowered and challenged to be your best self. You'll work with dynamic colleagues - experts in their fields - who are eager to share their knowledge with you. Your leaders will inspire and help you reach your potential and soar to new heights. Every day, you'll have new and exciting opportunities to make life brighter for our Clients - who are at the heart of everything we do.

At Sun Life, we're driven by our Purpose: helping our Clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. Our values shape how we work: caring, authentic, bold, inspiring, and impactful.

When you join Sun Life, you'll work with passionate colleagues and empowering leaders who support your growth and celebrate your contributions, so you can make a meaningful difference in our Clients' lives.

Discover how you can make a difference in the lives of individuals, families and communities around the world.

Job Description:

Sun Life is one of the leading financial institutions in Canada, offering Canadians holistic advice and innovative insurance, wealth and health solutions through digitally enabled, insights-driven human advisors. We are on an exciting journey to create exceptional experiences for Clients and advisors while strengthening the technology foundations that support our insurance business.

Reporting to the Director, Platform Owner, the Product Owner leads the vision, roadmap and evolution of the Traditional Product Development squad. Working with an agile squad and cross-functional partners, the role enables new and redesigned insurance products, evolves core policy-administration capabilities, and ensures accurate information flows to downstream systems supporting policy administration, compensation, reinsurance, valuation, sales reporting and Client communications.

The Product Owner balances product enablement, regulatory and operational priorities, and production support while aligning teams around clear outcomes and confident delivery.

What will you do?

Product vision, strategy and value

• Own and prioritize the Traditional Product Development backlog, ensuring investments align with the strategy and deliver measurable outcomes tied to Insurance Solutions priorities.
• Lead quarterly and sprint planning, making timely trade-offs based on user value, business impact, risk, dependencies, capacity and feasibility.
• Partner with product, pricing, actuarial, operations and technology teams to enable new product changes, including new product launches, product enhancements and repricing.
• Increase delivery speed and reduce implementation risk by leveraging tools and capabilities such as AI, automation and reusable solutions.

Delivery and cross-platform leadership

• Translate complex business and technical needs into clear features, acceptance criteria, delivery plans and implementation outcomes for the squad.
• Coordinate solutioning, data mapping, integration, testing and implementation readiness across upstream application teams, core administration systems and downstream partners.
• Identify risks, dependencies and sequencing issues early; structure ambiguity, evaluate options and escalate material decisions with clear recommendations.
• Lead delivery through analysis, development, testing, implementation and warranty support.
• Maintain transparent plans and communicate progress, priorities, trade-offs and decisions to squad members, partners and senior leaders.
• Promote automation, reusable solutions and continuous improvement to reduce cycle time, improve quality and simplify future product delivery.
• Strengthen knowledge sustainability through documentation, cross-training and reducing single points of failure.

Squad and stakeholder leadership

• Create clarity of purpose for the agile squad and foster shared accountability for outcomes, quality and delivery commitments.
• Build trusted relationships across business, operations, architecture, engineering, vendor and platform teams, influencing decisions without relying on formal authority.
• Champion disciplined backlog management, effective refinement, meaningful sprint reviews and evidence-based prioritization.
• Represent the squad in cross-platform planning and dependency forums, ensuring impacts are understood and appropriately sequenced.

What do you need to succeed?

• Five or more years of experience in product ownership, insurance delivery, technology delivery or a related field.
• Experience leading an agile product squad, managing a prioritized backlog and defining measurable outcomes.
• Strong product management skills across vision, road mapping, discovery, prioritization and value measurement.
• Proven delivery of complex capabilities involving core systems, data flows, integrations, testing and multiple stakeholder groups.
• Experience applying AI-enabled tools to accelerate analysis and delivery, improve quality and reduce implementation risk.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and decision-making skills, including the ability to manage ambiguity, dependencies, risks and competing priorities.
• Business acumen and the ability to connect technical and product decisions to Client, advisor, operational and financial outcomes.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, including with senior leaders.
• A collaborative leadership style that builds trust and alignment across organizational boundaries.

What will be nice to have:

• Knowledge of individual life and health insurance, including product design, pricing, policy administration and downstream processes.
• Experience enabling new insurance products, product series, repricing, regulatory changes or complex cross-system implementations.
• Knowledge of traditional policy-administration environments, inter-system feeds, batch processing or mainframe delivery.

What’s in it for you?

• We’re proud to be a Best Workplace for Hybrid Work by Great Place to Work® Canada
• Be part of our continuous improvement journey in developing the next greatest digital enterprise experience that is united by our Purpose: to help Clients and Employees achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives.
• Flexible Benefits from the day you join to meet the needs of you and your family.
• Pension, stock and savings programs to help build and enhance your future financial security.

The Base Pay range is for the primary location for which the job is posted. It may vary depending on the work location of the successful candidate or other factors. In addition to Base Pay, eligible Sun Life employees participate in various incentive plans, payment under which is discretionary and subject to individual and company performance. Certain sales focused roles have sales incentive plans based on individual or group sales results.

Diversity and inclusion have always been at the core of our values at Sun Life. A diverse workforce with wide perspectives and creative ideas benefits our Clients, the communities where we operate and all of us as colleagues. We welcome applications from qualified individuals from all backgrounds.

Persons with disabilities who need accommodation in the application process, or those needing job postings in an alternative format, may e-mail a request to [email protected].

We are proud to be a hybrid organization that offers our employees the choice and flexibility to work from both the office and virtually based on the needs of the business, our Clients and you.

We may use artificial intelligence to support candidate sourcing, screening, interview scheduling.

We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

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