Role Summary

The Product Owner is a core member of the empowered product team, partnering closely with the Product Manager, engineering, architecture, design, data, operations, and business stakeholders to translate product strategy into executable work. The Product Owner ensures validated opportunities are clearly defined, appropriately prioritized, and ready for delivery.

Working in close partnership with the Product Manager, the Product Owner maintains alignment between customer needs, product strategy, roadmap objectives, and team execution. The role helps accelerate learning and value delivery by ensuring the backlog reflects the product's priorities, outcomes, and evolving customer insights.

The Product Owner leverages customer knowledge, operational expertise, analytics, and emerging capabilities, including AI-enabled tools where appropriate, to improve backlog quality, delivery effectiveness, and team productivity.

The Product Owner plays a key role in helping the team identify, communicate, and reduce the risks of value, viability, usability, and feasibility by promoting customer understanding, solution clarity, delivery readiness, and cross-functional collaboration.

What You Will Own

Backlog Strategy and Readiness

• Maintain a healthy, prioritized backlog aligned to product goals, roadmap priorities, and customer outcomes.
• Translate product opportunities into features, user stories, defects, enablers, and acceptance criteria.
• Ensure work is appropriately sized, refined, and ready for delivery.
• Define clear acceptance criteria that reflect customer needs, business rules, compliance requirements, and operational considerations.
• Maintain traceability between customer problems, product objectives, and delivery work.
• Continuously evaluate backlog priorities based on outcomes, risk, dependencies, feedback, and business needs.

Solution Definition and Delivery Support

• Collaborate with Product Managers, engineers, architects, designers, and stakeholders to clarify requirements and solution intent.
• Facilitate story refinement, backlog grooming, and planning activities.
• Support decomposition of product initiatives into valuable, incremental releases.
• Ensure delivery teams understand business context, customer impacts, constraints, and dependencies.
• Make day-to-day delivery decisions that support progress within established product objectives and guardrails.
• Partner with engineering to balance customer value, technical feasibility, operational readiness, and delivery risk.

Customer and Business Context

• Maintain a deep understanding of users, operational workflows, business processes, and customer journeys.
• Participate in customer interviews, journey reviews, user testing, and discovery activities led by Product Managers.
• Translate customer insights into actionable product requirements and backlog improvements.
• Identify operational challenges, customer pain points, and process inefficiencies that may warrant further discovery.
• Serve as a connection point between customer needs and delivery execution.

Team Delivery Effectiveness

• Participate actively in sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives, demonstrations, and team ceremonies.
• Monitor delivery progress and proactively remove ambiguity that may slow execution.
• Coordinate dependency management across teams and stakeholders.
• Facilitate communication between business partners, engineering teams, and product leadership.
• Promote continuous improvement of team processes, quality, and ways of working.
• Support predictable delivery without sacrificing customer value or quality.

AI-Enabled Product Ownership

• Leverage AI to improve backlog refinement, story creation, acceptance criteria development, analysis, documentation, and communication.
• Use AI-enabled tools to improve team productivity and reduce administrative overhead.
• Apply AI responsibly while maintaining appropriate human judgment, validation, accountability, and governance.
• Support identification of opportunities where automation, AI, or emerging technologies may improve customer or operational outcomes.
• Continuously evaluate and improve team workflows through responsible use of AI-enabled capabilities.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product Managers to align roadmap objectives and delivery priorities.
• Collaborate with engineering, architecture, UX, operations, compliance, security, legal, and business partners.
• Surface risks, assumptions, dependencies, and implementation concerns early.
• Build alignment through transparency, customer context, data, and shared understanding.
• Help create an environment of trust, accountability, learning, and continuous improvement

What Success Looks Like

• The backlog clearly reflects product priorities and intended outcomes.
• Stories are well-defined, appropriately sized, and consistently ready for development.
• Teams spend less time seeking clarification and more time delivering value.
• Dependencies, risks, and blockers are identified and addressed early.
• Delivery increments align to roadmap objectives and customer needs.
• The team delivers high-quality solutions with minimal rework.
• Product Managers, engineers, and stakeholders have confidence in backlog quality and delivery readiness.
• AI-enabled practices improve efficiency while maintaining quality, accountability, and customer focus.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• Three or more years of experience in Product Ownership, Business Analysis, Product Management, Agile Delivery, Digital Product Development, or a related discipline.
• Experience working with Agile product teams in a cross-functional environment.
• Demonstrated ability to translate customer needs, business objectives, and product requirements into clear, actionable, and testable work items.
• Experience creating and refining user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, business rules, defects, and backlog items.
• Experience collaborating with engineering, architecture, operations, business, and product stakeholders.
• Ability to prioritize work and make trade-off recommendations within established product objectives and guardrails.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and critical-thinking skills.
• Strong communication, facilitation, and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience using Agile delivery and collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, Mural, or similar platforms.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous and rapidly changing environments while maintaining delivery focus.
• Demonstrated ability to influence decisions and build alignment without formal authority.
• Working knowledge of Agile methodologies, product delivery practices, and modern software development lifecycle concepts.
• Experience leveraging AI-enabled tools to improve analysis, documentation, communication, backlog refinement, or team effectiveness.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting an empowered product team operating within a product-centric delivery model.
• Experience partnering directly with Product Managers on product discovery, experimentation, roadmap planning, or outcome measurement.
• Familiarity with customer journey mapping, user research, usability testing, and customer feedback analysis.
• Experience decomposing large initiatives into incremental releases that deliver measurable customer and business value.
• Experience working within a highly regulated industry such as healthcare, financial services, insurance, or government.
• Understanding of software architecture, APIs, cloud technologies, data platforms, integration patterns, and technical delivery concepts sufficient to collaborate effectively with engineering teams.
• Familiarity with product metrics, analytics, experimentation, and evidence-based decision making.
• SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager (POPM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Agile Product Ownership, or similar certification.
• Experience applying AI-enabled tools and automation to improve team productivity, backlog quality, delivery processes, or operational efficiency.
• Familiarity with responsible AI principles, governance considerations, and appropriate human oversight practices.
• Experience supporting multiple teams, products, or complex cross-functional initiatives in a matrixed enterprise environment.

If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.

For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of 115,600 - 192,600 USD / yearly, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location.

This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus plan.

At The Cigna Group, you’ll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits, with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you’ll be offered several health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k), company paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year, paid holidays, and leaves of absence. For more details on our employee benefits programs, click here.

About Cigna Healthcare

Cigna Healthcare, a division of The Cigna Group, is an advocate for better health through every stage of life. We guide our customers through the health care system, empowering them with the information and insight they need to make the best choices for improving their health and vitality. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.

Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws.

If you need a reasonable accommodation to complete the online application process, please email seeyourself@thecignagroup.com for assistance.  Please note that this email inbox is dedicated to accommodation requests only and cannot provide application updates or accept resumes.

The Cigna Group has a tobacco-free policy and reserves the right not to hire tobacco/nicotine users in states where that is legally permissible. Candidates in such states who use tobacco/nicotine will not be considered for employment unless they enter a qualifying smoking cessation program prior to the start of their employment. These states include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Washington State.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances.