Product Owner

Title: Product Owner Location: Des Moines; Hartford

Product Owner, Annuity Operations

Global Atlantic — Individual Markets Insurance Operations  |  Hartford, CT or Des Moines, IA

POSITION OVERVIEW

The Product Owner is the link between annuity operations, product, compliance, and technology. This role owns the product backlog for our core operations platforms and develops expertise across this broad platform ecosystem. The Product Owner turns regulatory and business requirements into clear technical specifications and partners with vendor teams through platform implementation.

This is an individual contributor role reporting to the Product Manager and works day to day with Operations SMEs, project managers, and technology, QA, Compliance, Product, and Operational Risk partners, as well as third-party administrators and platform vendors. Success in this role means delivering roadmap items on time and to quality expectations, reducing defects, rework, and manual workarounds, running smooth cross-platform releases, achieving clean audit and control outcomes, and earning strong satisfaction from business partners.  Communications with business partners and stakeholders on capacity and priorities will be essential to ensure there are clear expectations of what will be delivered and when.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the vision, roadmap, and prioritized backlog for the operations platforms, covering BAU and strategic initiatives. Prioritize by business value, risk, deadlines, and cost.
• Lead sprint planning, backlog refinement, and sprint reviews, and accept or reject completed work against agreed criteria. Escalate cross-platform conflicts and significant scope changes.
• Gather requirements through workshops, process and customer journey mapping, design thinking sessions, and data review.
• Translate business needs into user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, business rules, and data requirements that engineering teams can build from, with traceability through design, test, and release.
• Define integration points between insurance systems and feeds to distributors, custodians, reinsurers, and finance and accounting systems.
• Partner with architects, engineers, and vendors on solution design that meets business intent, control standards, and integration needs.
• Define test strategies, including end-to-end testing across platforms and edge cases such as contract provisions, rider behavior, and tax and withholding rules. Lead user acceptance testing and go/no-go decisions.
• Coordinate release planning, training, procedure updates, and change management so operations teams are ready at launch.
• Ensure up and down stream impacts are vetted and known, while supporting regression and end to end testing
• Track post-release performance and delivered value, drive continuous improvement, and identify automation and AI-enabled opportunities.
• Follow the firm's SDLC, change management, and audit standards, and identify operational risks early with mitigations.
• Serve as the primary business contact for technology teams, vendors, stakeholders, and third-party administrators; participate in vendor teams and industry forums; and report on delivery progress and risks.
• Establish cadence and align on expectation for communication and transparency on priorities and roadmaps to key constituents and leadership.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• Life insurance or annuity operations experience preferred.
• Experience writing user stories, functional specifications, and acceptance criteria for technical teams, using Agile methodologies (Scrum or Kanban) and tools such as Jira.
• Strong analytical skills, including process mapping and working with data (familiarity with XML/JSON data structures; SQL a plus), with sound judgment in using data to prioritize.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex topics to business and technical audiences and collaborate across teams.
• Ownership mindset, attention to detail, integrity, and a bias for action, with the ability to spot risks early and escalate at the right time.
• Comfort using AI-powered tools to improve productivity and quality of work
• Curiosity about and openness to adopting emerging AI technologies in day-to-day workflows
• Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated outputs for accuracy and relevance