Sr Manager, Product Owner

USRM is looking for a Senior Product Owner (SPO) to lead a portfolio of work focused on developing and enhancing our Personal Lines product offerings across the Direct and Independent Agent channels. In this highly visible role, the SPO will lead a team of Product Owners in the USRM Policy Products organization supporting agile software engineering squads and report to the Senior Director, Core Product Platforms.

The SPO owns end-to-end capabilities supporting Personal Lines forms and products, leading the team in product configuration, rules, metadata, versioning, and validation. The portfolio is also responsible for ensuring accurate applicability logic for coverages, deductibles, endorsements, and renewals as we maintain our current state products and build out capabilities and logic in support of our multi-year transformational journey (Frontier) to simplify and modernize our Product offering and our Technology.

The primary areas of responsibility for this role are:

Forms & Quoting Enablement

• Provide PO leadership for Forms as a domain capability, recognizing its importance beyond policy only use cases (i.e. claims coverage).
• Partner with Forms teams (Direct and IA) to rationalize architectures and align toward a scalable target state.
• Support ongoing modernization efforts, including brand transitions and extraction of Guidewire dependencies where appropriate.

Platform & Data Model Leadership

• Product Definition support for:
• Auto, Home, Specialty, and emerging products
• Migration away from legacy policy retrieval toward modern APIs and services
• Normalize data across legacy Direct & Independent Agent platforms as well as the Guidewire-based Unified Insurance Platform (UIP)

Stakeholder & Intake Management

• Coordinate with other functions to drive high-quality delivery and experiences for project teams dependent on Policy capabilities.
• Act as the single point of intake and prioritization for Forms and Product Definition demand across:
• Product teams, including LOB and Compliance teams
• Claims, Service, Finance
• Business & Technical Architecture
• ECS (Electronic Content Solutions)
• Enable faster impact analysis, fewer intake loops, and better reuse of requirements and templates.

Leadership & Delivery

• Lead and influence cross-functional teams, including onshore, offshore, and contractor resources.
• Set clear expectations and delivery models for contractors vs. FTEs.
• Partner closely with Engineering Managers, Architects, and Frontier leadership.

Innovation & AI Enablement

Identify opportunities to apply AI to:

• Impact analysis
• Requirement reuse
• Testing automation
• Runbook and operational support creation
• Translate vendor/consultant insights into executable roadmap items.

Effective portfolio and customer-facing team relationships are key to our success, with the SPO building those relationships and driving the team to fulfill those foundational products and services. The SPO will lead a team that operates at the intersection of business and technology to ultimately deliver highly consumable services.

This leader will be responsible for articulating and translating the overall business vision into strategy and direction and contributing to outcomes and key KPI’s tied directly to business objectives. The SPO works closely with peers and cross functional partners to define and prioritize the product backlog, sets quality standards for delivery, and represents the platform which must be scalable, compliant, performant and easily consumed by other teams. This leader is also responsible for overseeing a set of products and working closely with USRM Product IT leadership to ensure teams are appropriately resourced, focused on the key priorities, and have alignment between roadmaps to achieve objectives.

About the Role:

• Sets ambitious and clear strategy, develops comprehensive portfolio vision, and translates into specific feature strategies and roadmaps.
• Communicates the strategy effectively to key stakeholders and team members.
• Owns alignment of development and business resources on goals and priorities while working with stakeholders and team to remove roadblocks to execution.
• Has responsibility and accountability for assigned portfolio-level key performance indicators (KPI’s) and manages product and/or service with a medium-to-high degree of strategy, KPI, scope, complexity, etc.
• Ensures the proper controls, processes and business procedures are maintained for the shared services owned by the portfolio.
• Owns & manages backlog (grooming, prioritization and refinement) influenced by cross-functional partners and directly within their own platform within a highly matrixed organization, with guidance from leadership
• Leads the analysis of feasibility, cost ramifications, economies, or other aspects of planned or potential programs.
• Has direct management responsibility for a team of product owners.

Ideal candidate:

• Has knowledge of product offerings, business processes, relevant applications and services, and underwriting rules for Personal Lines Direct and/or IA markets.
• Has experience as a Senior-level Product Owner or Domain PO in complex enterprise platforms.
• Can demonstrate a proven ability to lead through ambiguity and build alignment across organizations.
• Has ability to effectively manage and deliver outcomes across functional groups, priorities and roadmaps.
• Partners with IT and Business leaders to both understand the benefit of and drive technology modernization alongside business delivery.