Job Description & Details
This Product Owner Premium II gig puts you right in the middle of a major public sector-adjacent initiative in Washington, DC, where you will be orchestrating delivery across multiple agile teams. Expect a heavy hybrid schedule from day one—four days a week onsite moving rapidly to 100% onsite—so you'll need to be local and ready to collaborate face-to-face with stakeholders who expect high accountability and clear value delivery. If you enjoy untangling complex bureaucratic requirements and turning them into razor-sharp technical execution, this six-month contract with potential extension is worth a serious look.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You will spend your days bridging the gap between high-level business strategy and the engineering trenches, constantly refining a massive team backlog in Azure DevOps. Your primary battle will be managing competing priorities from various stakeholders, facilitating workshops to build consensus, and writing crystal-clear user stories with bulletproof acceptance criteria. You aren't just pushing tickets around; you're using real delivery metrics to drive data-backed prioritization decisions, keeping sprints unblocked, and ensuring cross-functional engineering units are actually building what the customer needs.
The Core Tech Stack
While you won't be writing production code, mastering Azure DevOps (ADO) is non-negotiable for this role since it's the nerve center for all tracking, sprint management, and reporting. Beyond the tooling, your actual tech stack is pure Agile methodology—specifically Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe frameworks scaled across multi-team delivery environments. You need deep fluency in product lifecycle management and dependency mapping because a missed dependency upstream will instantly derail your downstream sprint execution.
Interview Expectations
When you sit down with the hiring manager, expect them to test your ability to say "no" to powerful stakeholders without burning bridges; they will likely ask how you handle a situation where two executive sponsors demand competing features for the same sprint. They want to see that you rely on data-driven prioritization and transparent roadmap alignment rather than emotion. You should also be prepared for a scenario question on managing technical debt versus feature delivery in a SAFe environment, where they are secretly evaluating whether you protect engineering health or just blindly chase business outputs.
Application Advice
To get past the automated screen for this Mindlance posting, your resume needs to heavily feature exact keyword matches like product backlog management, user stories, acceptance criteria, SAFe, and Azure DevOps. Don't just list your past job titles; write bullet points that explicitly demonstrate how you scaled agile practices, managed multi-team dependencies, and used delivery metrics to drive product strategy in a hybrid corporate environment.