Sr. Project Manager / Product Owner

Aquent, a leading talent solutions partner, is excited to connect you with a pivotal opportunity at a renowned organization dedicated to providing essential services and enhancing customer experiences. This industry leader is at the forefront of leveraging technology to ensure seamless, critical communications, especially during high-stakes situations. Join a team that values innovation, reliability, and customer satisfaction, where your work directly impacts the lives of countless individuals by keeping them informed and connected.

Step into a dynamic role where you will be the driving force behind critical customer communications and transformative platform initiatives. As a key player, you will bridge the gap between business vision and technical execution, directly influencing how customers receive vital, time-sensitive information across multiple channels. Your expertise will ensure operational excellence, enhance customer satisfaction, and contribute to the resilience of essential services, making a tangible impact on daily operations and emergency responses.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the gathering, drafting, and refinement of business rules, functional specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria, maintaining and prioritizing the product enhancement backlog within tools like Jira/Azure DevOps.
• Drive the delivery of customer-facing messaging initiatives, ensuring seamless, automated, and time-sensitive outbound notifications across SMS, email, voice, web, and mobile channels.
• Act as the primary liaison between non-technical business units and technical development teams, translating strategic business goals into actionable technical deliverables.
• Coordinate with internal stakeholders and external vendors (onshore and offshore) to define requirements, track deliverables, manage integration dependencies, and lead User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to validate deployment readiness.
• Own project lifecycles from kickoff to post-launch validation, tracking risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies (RAID), and providing executive status reporting and operational dashboards.
• Support cross-functional operational needs, including compliance considerations (e.g., TCPA messaging rules), and participate in a shared rotation for off-hours/evening support during critical customer outage or emergency situations.

Qualifications (Must-Have)

• 5-12 years of hands-on experience as a Product Owner (PO), Product Manager (PM), Business Analyst (BA), or Technical Project Manager (TPM) in a fast-paced enterprise environment.
• Demonstrated success supporting multi-channel customer communications programs, notification engines, or customer engagement platforms with a strong focus on customer experience (CX).
• Proven expertise in writing functional user stories, managing backlogs, running sprint ceremonies, and executing hands-on UAT in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Ability to understand system integrations, APIs, and data flows between multiple platforms without needing to code personally.
• Strong track record coordinating cross-functional teams and holding third-party vendors accountable to strict delivery timelines.

Qualifications (Nice-to-Have)

• Direct experience in electric, gas, water, or smart-grid utilities, or complex regulated infrastructure environments.
• Direct exposure to customer-facing communications during emergency, time-sensitive, or service-interruption/outage situations (e.g., Estimated Time to Restore / ETR alerts).
• Experience with dedicated notification platforms, automated messaging engines, or IVR routing tools.