Product Manager

JAVELINA PRODUCT ORGANIZATION

Product Owner — Job Description

Companion to the Target State & Phasing Options document

This job description defines the Product Owner role as designed in the target-state operating model. It has two variants depending on assignment, described in Section 4. This is a draft description for the target state — actual hiring, reassignment, and talent mapping from today's fused PM/PO role have not yet happened, and are addressed separately in the phasing discussion. The companion Product Manager role is documented in a separate job description.

Product Owners own delivery success for an assigned backlog — either a protected back-end domain or a front-cluster assignment drawn from the shared PO pool. They own backlog readiness, sprint execution, and release readiness, and are the primary point of contact for engineering during a sprint.

• Own backlog readiness and story refinement for the assigned domain or cluster, ensuring every item entering a sprint has scope, value, and acceptance-criteria clarity.
• Make “ready” and “done” calls on standard backlog items independently, without requiring Product Manager sign-off; escalate to the PM only for genuinely new scope.
• Lead sprint planning, refinement, acceptance, and release readiness with the delivery team.
• Maintain delivery predictability for the assigned backlog: track commitments vs. actuals, and surface blockers and dependencies early via the dependency/risk register.
• Participate in the weekly PM/PO Sync as the default venue for raising delivery reality, resolving front/back prioritization contention, and receiving new strategic direction from the PM in a controlled way rather than mid-sprint.
• Protect the sprint from uncontrolled scope injection: new strategic direction from the PM enters the backlog only at PI or sprint boundaries, except for true emergencies.

• Market strategy, roadmap prioritization, or portfolio investment decisions — these belong to the Product Manager and Product Council.
• Solutioning or feature definition beyond backlog readiness — the PM owns problem framing and value cases.
• A seat on the Product Council — POs are represented there through their PM, not directly.

Variant

Scope

Assignment Model

Dedicated Back-Domain PO

One of the three protected domains: Adjudication Engine, Premium Billing, Enrollment Rules

Permanently assigned to one domain, with a protected delivery team; capacity cannot be reallocated without Product Council sign-off

Shared Front-Cluster Pool PO

Any of the six front clusters

Assigned day-to-day to whichever Cluster PM they are currently supporting; allocation flexes across clusters as demand shifts

• 8–12 years of experience owning Agile/Scrum delivery for a backlog of meaningful complexity.
• US healthcare domain expertise is required. For dedicated back-domain POs, this must include technical or regulatory fluency in the assigned area — claims adjudication and medical policy, benefit plan data structures, or enrollment/eligibility rules engines.
• Comfortable making ready/done calls independently and pushing back on scope without needing PM validation.
• Pool POs: comfortable working across multiple Cluster PMs and journeys rather than a single fixed backlog.
• Skilled at eliciting and accurately capturing requirements — translating a Product Manager's intent into refined backlog items with clear acceptance criteria.
• Able to organize and manage large amounts of information — backlog items, dependencies, sprint metrics — without losing track of detail.
• Rigorous about process adherence — Agile/Scrum ceremonies, planning-boundary discipline, and readiness standards are followed consistently, not selectively.
• Comfortable resolving conflict — between competing scope requests, engineering pushback, and cross-team dependencies — before escalating.
• Strong cross-team collaborator — works closely with engineering, their Product Manager partner(s), and, for pool POs, multiple product areas at once.