Technical Product Owner

Experience Level: Senior / Lead
Work Type: Productbased, Technologyled Programs

Location: Chennai

Role Summary

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) is responsible for maximizing business and customer value by owning and prioritizing the technical and functional backlog for one or more agile teams. The TPO acts as a key liaison between business stakeholders, product management, architecture, and engineering teams, ensuring that complex technology solutions are delivered with quality, predictability, and alignment to product strategy.

This role requires strong technical domain knowledge, product mindset, and the ability to translate business outcomes into scalable, secure, and performant technology solutions. This role is critical as our products evolve toward cloudnative, SaaSbased, and AIenabled platforms.

Key Responsibilities

Product & Technical Ownership

- Own and manage the endtoend backlog (features, enablers, technical debt, defects) for assigned product areas.
- Translate business welldefined user stories, technical stories, and acceptance criteria, balancing functional and nonfunctional requirements.
- Ensure backlog prioritization aligns with business value, architectural roadmap, delivery dependencies, and risk mitigation.
- Balance feature delivery with platform stability, scalability, performance, and technical health.
- Continuously refine and groom backlog in partnership with engineering and architecture.

Agile Delivery & Team Collaboration

- Actively participate in Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, Reviews, and Retrospectives.
- Provide continuous clarification to delivery teams on functional, technical, and nonfunctional requirements.
- Partner with Solution Architects and Tech Leads to ensure design feasibility, extensibility, and longterm maintainability.
- Support PI Planning and crossteam dependency management in scaled agile environments (SAFe).

Technical & Architectural Engagement





- Understand and contribute to system design discussions, including APIs, data flows, integrations, and service boundaries.
- Ensure nonfunctional requirements (performance, scalability, security, reliability, compliance) are explicitly captured and validated.
- Balance feature delivery with platform health, operational efficiency, and technical debt reduction.
- Drive traceability from business intent technical design implementation validation.

Stakeholder Management & Communication

- Serve as the single point of accountability for backlog priorities and scope decisions within the agile team.
- Collaborate with business stakeholders, product managers, and client partners to manage expectations and outcomes.
- Communicate product progress, risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs using datadriven and outcomefocused metrics.
- Ensure transparency through tools such as Jira, Confluence, and Agile reporting dashboards.

Quality, Governance & Continuous Improvement

- Validate completed work against acceptance criteria, architectural standards, and quality benchmarks.
- Track and monitor delivery and product health metrics, including predictability, stability, and customer impact.
- Proactively reduce technical debt and improve system resilience and maintainability.
- Champion Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Improvement practices within the delivery team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Technical Competencies

- Solid understanding of software architecture, APIs, integrations, data flows, and cloud-native systems.




- Working knowledge of microservices, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), CI/CD, and DevOps practices, containers, and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Ability to comprehend technical design documents, architecture diagrams, and system dependencies.
- Experience handling nonfunctional requirements (performance, security, availability, compliance).
- Exposure to SaaS platforms and operational considerations (monitoring, logging, reliability).
- Understanding of AIassisted capabilities, such as automation, intelligent workflows or agentbased solutions.
- Ability to translate AI capabilities into practical product use cases with appropriate guardrails.
- Awareness of data, privacy, security, and governance considerations in AIenabled systems.

Product & Agile Competencies

- Proven experience as a Product Owner / Technical Product Owner in agile product environments.
- Strong backlog management, prioritization, and requirement clarification skills.
- Handson experience with Agile / Scrum / SAFe, including PI Planning and multiteam coordination.
- Proficiency with Jira, Confluence, and agile delivery metrics.

Professional & Leadership Skills

- Strong stakeholder influence and communication skills across business and technology audiences.
- Ability to make datadriven tradeoff decisions in complex delivery scenarios.
- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence in crossfunctional, distributed teams.
- High degree of ownership, accountability, and delivery focus.

Qualifications & Experience

- Bachelors degree in engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline.
- 6–10+ years of overall experience, with 3–6+ years in Product Owner / Technical Product roles.
- Prior experience as Senior Developer, Technical Lead, System Analyst, or Technical BA is highly desirable.
- Agile certifications such as CSPO, PSPO, SAFe POPM are preferred.

📌 Product Owner (Chennai)
🏢 Cognizant
📍 Chennai