Portfolio Product Owner

Overview

USRM Frontier program is a multiyear transformational journey to simplify and modernize its Product offering and Technology across channels for all personal lines (Auto, Property and Specialty). This includes modernizing our core policy admin systems and all connections in and out of it (Distribution, Service, Claims, Data, Finance, etc.).

This Quality Portfolio Product Owner is critical to ensuring the quality and reliability of the Frontier ecosystem across all domains. This role owns the product strategy for quality infrastructure — including test automation, environments, defect management, and UAT coordination — working end-to-end across domains and squads. We are seeking a PPO with a strong technical background to engage with engineering leaders, make informed trade-off decisions, and lead cross-domain alignment on quality standards and practices.

Frontier Quality–Specific Responsibilities

• Quality Infrastructure Backlog Ownership: Own and prioritize the backlog for quality infrastructure in Frontier (test automation frameworks, test environments, test data management, quality tooling, etc.) in close partnership with the Technology Quality Lead EM. Leverage strong technical acumen to evaluate trade-offs and ensure the backlog reflects both near-term delivery needs and long-term platform quality goals.
• UAT Coordination Across E2E Journeys & Domains: Lead and coordinate User Acceptance Testing across end-to-end customer journeys and all Frontier domains. Partner with domain PPOs, POs, business stakeholders, and our system integration partner to ensure UAT cycles are well-planned, entry/exit criteria are clear, and business sign-off is achieved on schedule.
• Post-Launch Defect Management & Trade-Off Leadership: Lead defect reporting, triage, and prioritization post-launch, serving as the central coordination point between business and technology. Facilitate trade-off conversations — balancing severity, business impact, customer experience, and delivery capacity — to drive clear, timely decisions.
• Quality Roadmap & Risk Management: Lead quality road mapping in partnership with Technology, the Transformation Office, domain PPOs, and the external System Integrator. Act as primary escalation point for quality-related risks across the program — whether from test coverage gaps, environment instability, automation debt, or post-launch defect trends.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Regularly communicate quality status, UAT readiness, defect trends, and risk posture to cross-domain stakeholders. Translate technical quality metrics into business-meaningful insights for leadership.

Other PPO Responsibilities

• Sets cross portfolio quality strategy and translates into roadmaps based on ongoing stakeholder input.
• Accountable for quality-related product KPIs (e.g., defect escape rates, automation coverage, UAT cycle times, post-launch resolution SLAs).
• Leads IT and business leadership alignment on priorities while removing roadblocks to execution.
• Owns and maintains the cross portfolio/program level quality backlog and its prioritization.
• Contributes to and leads portfolio quarterly planning.
• Leads analysis and reporting on feasibility, cost of delay, and other aspects of planned or potential changes.

The Ideal Candidate Will Have

• Strong technical background — deep familiarity with quality engineering practices, test automation, CI/CD pipelines, and Guidewire or similar core platform technologies. Able to hold an informed, independent point of view with engineering leaders on technical trade-offs.
• Insurance knowledge and understanding of end-to-end policy lifecycle.
• Experience with large-scale core platform transformations (Guidewire implementations, etc.) strongly preferred.
• Strong strategic thinking — able to drive the right quality investments and align sequencing and priorities across domains.
• Exceptional ability to facilitate difficult trade-off conversations across business and technology, particularly in high-pressure post-launch scenarios.
• Strong resilience and perseverance