As a Product Owner, you'll be directly aligned with one of our agile engineering teams, articulating and prioritizing customer challenges and opportunities for the team to solve in collaboration with the User Experience team. The ideal candidate will have excellent business acumen, experience in SaaS product management, and a passion for working in K-12 education technology, specifically in driving efficiencies in back-office systems and processes for K-12 school districts.
In this role, data and analytics are the product, not a feature of one. As the Product Owner for our Advanced Analytics offering, you will work with school districts and education service agencies to build and maintain a platform that enables them to create their own data products while also developing ours. The foundation of this offering includes our data lakehouse, reports, dashboards, and the advanced capabilities that sit on top of the data. You will also partner with other Product Owners across the organization to support their analytics and reporting needs. This is a great opportunity for a highly organized, data-driven, and customer-focused individual with experience working with data platforms at scale.
We welcome candidates from a variety of locations; however, all candidates should be open to occasional in-person participation for business meetings, team events, or collaboration opportunities. Candidates located within approximately 35 miles of Rochester, NY may be asked to work from the office more frequently based on business or team needs.
Compensation
$90,000 - $140,000
What You'll Accomplish
- Works with the Product Director to translate high-level company vision and strategy into actionable product plans.
- Partners with Customers to identify and prioritize needs, documents them as epics with requirements and acceptance criteria, and works with Engineering and UX to break them into plannable features and stories while serving as the Customer advocate throughout development.
- Validates that solutions deliver meaningful impact against Epics and strategic goals, and coordinates with documentation, training, support, and marketing to prepare for release.
- Where appropriate, facilitates user acceptance testing and/or feedback demonstrations of work prior to release, collates and assesses feedback, and reshapes team priorities as needed to maximize value for the customer.
- Serves as a product SME for service, sales, and marketing, and represents SchoolTool externally at User Groups and Conferences to present features and gather customer feedback.
- Actively facilitates and participates in team retrospectives and the continuous improvements of our organizational structure, processes, and tooling to drive greater operational efficiency and value for our customers.
- Applies an AI-first mindset by effectively leveraging AI-assisted tools and technologies to enhance productivity, accelerate problem-solving, improve quality, automate routine tasks, and drive innovation in the delivery of solutions and services.
Requirements
- Strong written and verbal communication skills over complex topics with both internal technical team members and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong organizational / prioritization skills with the ability to prioritize incoming requests from multiple channels, manage concurrent projects, course correct for changing priorities via Support and APM tools.
- Ability to assess how different users consume and act on data and to define solutions appropriate to the user's context (e.g., compliance reporting vs. operational decision-making vs. self-service exploration).
- Ability to define data quality, timeliness, and accuracy as product requirements, understanding that these are customer-facing decisions, not just engineering concerns.
- Ability to define measurable success criteria for analytics features beyond delivery, including adoption, accuracy, and impact on user decision-making or operational efficiency.
- Ability to work with customers to understand their data and reporting needs at the outcome level, focusing on what decisions they need to make rather than taking requests at face value.
- Demonstrates sound judgment in the ethical, secure, and compliant use of AI technologies while protecting confidential, customer, and company information.
- Identifies opportunities to use AI to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, improve efficiency, and increase business value.
Licenses & Certifications
- CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) or equivalent certification and/or experience a plus.
Education & Experience
- BA in Information Technology, Computer Science or related technical fields preferred, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
- 4+ years of experience as a Product Owner, owning a data platform strategy, including how data is structured, accessed, and used to drive decisions through reporting and analytics solutions (canned reports, dashboards, self-service tools, alerts, data exports) and to drive more advanced product features is strongly preferred.
- 4+ years of experience in PK-12, strong familiarity with PK-12 data domains, ideally Ed-Fi (SIS, Assessment, SPED, MTSS, Instruction, HR, and Finance), and how they are used to drive decisions for school districts is preferred.
Why Join Mindex?
For more than 30 years, Mindex has helped organizations solve complex business challenges through custom software, cloud, data, and AI solutions. We combine deep technical expertise with a collaborative culture that empowers our employees to innovate, grow, and make a meaningful impact for our clients.
In our Product division, our teams have built platforms such as SchoolTool, Advanced Analytics, and our Integrations Platform from the ground up, while also supporting solutions like MTSS Edge and ClearTrack that help schools and organizations make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Benefits
- Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- 401(k) with Company Match
- Company-Paid Life and Disability Insurance
- Professional Development Opportunities
Additional Information
Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the United States. Mindex is unable to sponsor employment visas at this time.
Physical Requirements/Conditions:
- Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer
- No heavy lifting is expected. Exertion of up to 10 lbs.
