Sr Product Owner - Middle Office Services, Platform Strategy and Support

Your Opportunity

At Schwab, you're empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us "challenge the status quo" and transform the finance industry together.

Schwab Operations provides operational support for all Schwab enterprises including, but not limited to, Advisor Services, Investor Services and Schwab's International business. Schwab Operations supports external and internal clients, Branch Financial Consultants and Independent Investment Advisors to fulfill our purpose of championing every client's goals with passion and integrity. We inspire client loyalty by creating and delivering a world-class operational support experience while also focusing on employee loyalty and team collaboration.

The Middle Office Services Platform Strategy and Support team is responsible for facilitating the modernization and maintaining the viability of Schwab systems that support account open and maintenance, client onboarding, transfer of assets, cashiering and fraud prevention. The team leverages its business and technical expertise in partnership with business and technology stakeholders to implement a strategic vision for the platform including participation in design, requirements development, prioritization, development, testing and certification activities. The Sr. Product Owner (PO) plays a critical role in realization of the platform vision with focus on individual systems and their enterprise interdependencies.

Within this team, the Sr. PO will report to the Director overseeing Corporate Customer and Account business capabilities. The individual in this role will collaborate with key business & IT stakeholders and partners in defining scope, interpreting requirements and priorities for the enhancement, modernization and transformation of these capabilities. The role will require the PO to have a mix of business and technical knowledge, acting as a liaison/partner to maintain business and IT alignment. The ideal PO should possess a good understanding of the financial industry, software development life-cycle and a holistic view for their products.

What you'll do:

• Serve as the primary contact between our business and IT partners to ensure that business requirements are well documented and technical solutions transformed to meet business strategies
• Conduct requirement-elicitation meetings with users, developers, system design architects, system integrators and vendors; understanding the context of critical stakeholder needs, pain points and business impact
• Provide thought-leadership on vision; roadmaps for system development and achieving sprint goals
• Partner with cross-functional business and technology teams to create process models, user epics/stories and/or initial use case survey/use cases
• Understand both business and technical dependencies between business areas and within systems that support or may be impacted by middle office functionality; upstream as well as downstream
• Perform planning and scoping for several inter-related initiatives to help senior-level business stakeholders make informed decisions about which initiatives to tackle and how
• Elicit, document and manage business requirements
• Facilitate and drive issues resolution and retrospectives between stakeholders
• Develop expert 'As Is' knowledge of platform systems and help define 'To Be' system solutions and flows
• Handle complex, high profile projects (across multiple domains, systems and stakeholders)
• Adapt to changing priorities and managing of multiple tasks
• Coordinate and oversee the work of other BAs as it relates to specific projects
• Learn all middle office services business processes and system flows at a high level, and some flows in extreme detail
• Support business implementation process for new and/or enhanced system features
• Assist with training and support to frontline staff as appropriate

What you have

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent business experience
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills - ability to quickly analyze data to identify key insights and apply them to the business; quantitative and qualitative analysis
• Confidence in presenting both strategic and tactical vision to the team and management for both big-picture planning and day-to-day management of project goal
• Ability to align and unify ALL stakeholders to a shared vision and a common focus; including senior leaders
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, organizational and negotiation skills
• Product and project management skills; business judgment, including ability to balance resources, evaluate and address risks, and concisely articulate where trade-off decisions are to be made
• Strong orientation to clients, including ability to understand needs and apply this knowledge to product enhancements, online user experience, and communication content (internal and external)
• Ability to analyze and communicate technology recommendations to business stakeholders
• 3-to- 5 years' experience managing requirements for multiple large, complex and cross functional projects. Emphasis on systems, technologies, business process redesign, and knowledge of technical environments
• 5 years' experience in software development methodology (Agile Framework)
• Proven ability to write business requirements, including user stories, use case development and work flow documentation
• High attention to detail and the ability to see things through from concept to implementation
• Prior working knowledge of JIRA or any related Scrum tools preferred
• Competence in Microsoft Office tools including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Visio

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strategic mindset to help drive product management decisions, governance, and long-term vision
• Securities Industry/Operational background preferred; a focus on account open solutions