Sr. Product Owner

Work Schedule

Environmental Conditions

Job Description

JOB DESCRIPTION: 

Sr Business Analyst - Product Owner 

At Thermo Fisher Scientific, we develop innovative software solutions that enable our customers to advance science and improve human health. It is a close-knit, collaborative, cross-functional environment where Product Management, Software Engineering, Software Verification & Validation, Quality, and other functions work together to deliver high-quality products. The software team is tasked with applying industry best practices to the definition, design, development, verification, validation, and delivery of world-class software products for clinical and research settings. 

We are seeking an experienced and highly motivated Sr Business Analyst - Product Owner who will serve as the primary liaison between the Product Management team and the Software Engineering and Software V&V teams. This individual will translate product and customer needs into clear, complete, testable, and implementation-ready requirements and user stories so that Development and V&V teams have a common understanding of intended product behavior. The Product Owner will act as the single point of contact for functional understanding of the product and will own the quality and completeness of requirements throughout the software development lifecycle. 

You are excited and passionate about participating in an Agile/SCRUM setting to meet customer expectations and continuously drive quality and delivery improvements. You are comfortable working with technical and business stakeholders, facilitating decisions, identifying gaps, and constructively challenging assumptions. You do not stop at identifying problems; you develop practical proposals, build cross-functional alignment, drive actions to closure, and use meaningful metrics to demonstrate measurable improvement in requirement quality, defect prevention, and product delivery. 

Essential Functions: 

• Serve as the primary liaison between Product Management, Software Engineering, and Software V&V, ensuring a common understanding of product requirements, workflows, priorities, and expected system behavior. 

• Translate product requirements, customer needs, business objectives, scientific workflows, and regulatory considerations into clear Epics, Features, User Stories, and Acceptance Criteria that can be independently understood and executed by Software Development and V&V teams. 

• Own the functional quality and completeness of software requirements throughout the product development lifecycle and ensure requirements are clear, consistent, testable, traceable, and sufficiently detailed before implementation begins. 

• Ensure user stories capture the business and user objective, functional behavior, user workflows and use cases, business rules, acceptance criteria, positive and negative scenarios, boundary and exception conditions, dependencies, assumptions, data and integration considerations, and expected behavior required for verification and validation. 

• Establish and drive effective requirements review and backlog refinement mechanisms so that Product Management, Engineering, V&V, and other relevant stakeholders have a shared understanding of scope and expected behavior before development begins. 

• Drive adoption and continuous improvement of Definition of Ready, requirement quality standards, story templates, review checklists, traceability practices, and other mechanisms that improve requirement completeness and reduce downstream ambiguity and rework. 

• Act as the single point of contact for functional interpretation and clarification of product requirements for Software Engineering and V&V teams. Maintain an end-to-end understanding of product workflows and proactively identify gaps, inconsistencies, dependencies, and unintended interactions across features. 

• Ensure key product decisions, requirement clarifications, assumptions, changes, and impact assessments are documented and communicated to affected stakeholders, including impacts to existing functionality, development, V&V, documentation, timelines, and related product components. 

• Drive processes and preventive actions that reduce defects whose root cause is attributed to Requirement Miss, incomplete or ambiguous requirements, inadequate acceptance criteria, or inconsistent functional interpretation. 

• Play a leadership role in software defect triage, partnering with Product Management, Engineering, and V&V to establish expected system behavior and distinguish among software implementation defects, requirement misses or ambiguities, test coverage gaps, change requests or enhancements, and expected product behavior. 

• Ensure defect triage results in clear decisions, owners, actions, and closure criteria, and drive timely resolution of product and functional questions that could otherwise block Software Development or V&V execution. 

• Analyze requirement-related defects and defect trends to identify systemic patterns and recurring gaps. Partner with Engineering, V&V, and Product Management leaders to define corrective and preventive actions and drive those actions through completion. 

• Establish and monitor meaningful quality and delivery metrics, including Requirement Miss defects, requirement-related defect escape rate, user-story rework after development begins, story readiness, acceptance-criteria completeness, requirement churn, defect recurrence, triage aging, corrective-action completion, and reduction in Development and V&V rework. 

• Use metrics not only for reporting but to identify systemic issues, prioritize improvement opportunities, demonstrate the effectiveness of corrective actions, and show measurable improvement across releases or program increments. 

• Work effectively with senior leadership and cross-functional teams, influence without direct authority, facilitate difficult discussions, create alignment among stakeholders with different priorities, and drive decisions and actions to closure. 

• Demonstrate a strong ownership mindset, team spirit, and proactive approach to process and delivery improvement. Raise gaps early and pair identified issues with practical recommendations, proposals, or solution options rather than limiting the role to escalation or issue identification. 

• Mentor and guide team members in effective requirements development, user-story creation, functional analysis, defect triage, and product-development practices, promoting shared accountability for product quality and delivery across Product Management, Engineering, and V&V. 

Minimum Qualifications (must have): 

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences, or a related discipline. Master's degree preferred. 

• Typically 10+ years of relevant industry experience in software product development, product ownership, business analysis, requirements engineering, software engineering, software quality, or related functions, with a strong track record of delivering results. 

• Demonstrated experience working as a Product Owner, Senior Business Analyst, Requirements Lead, Systems Analyst, or equivalent role within a software development organization. 

• Strong experience translating complex product, customer, scientific, or business needs into clear, actionable, and testable software requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria. 

• Strong understanding of the software development lifecycle and Agile/SCRUM methodologies, including backlog refinement, sprint planning, requirements management, development, verification and validation, defect management, and release activities. 

• Strong understanding of the relationship between requirements, software design and development, verification, validation, and overall product quality, with demonstrated experience working closely with Software Engineering and Software V&V/Quality teams. 

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to understand complex workflows, identify missing scenarios, dependencies, edge cases, and requirement gaps, and develop practical proposals to address them. 

• Demonstrated experience leading cross-functional discussions, influencing stakeholders without direct authority, driving decisions to closure, and working effectively with senior leadership. 

• Demonstrated ability to establish and use metrics, defect trend analysis, root-cause analysis, and corrective/preventive actions to improve requirement quality, product quality, process effectiveness, and delivery outcomes. 

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to communicate complex functional and technical concepts effectively with Product Management, Software Engineering, V&V, Quality, Program Management, and senior leaders. 

• Experience working in a fast-paced, dynamic, collaborative environment with a proactive ownership mindset and strong team orientation. 

• Experience developing software products within Life Sciences, Biotechnology, Genomics, NGS, Clinical, Medical Device, or IVD domains preferred, including familiarity with complex scientific, bioinformatics, analytical, or instrument-software workflows. 

• Good understanding of design controls for regulated products and familiarity with applicable medical device and IVD software standards and regulations, such as ISO 13485, IEC 62304, and 21 CFR Part 820, preferred. 

• Experience with requirements-management and Agile lifecycle tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent platforms, and experience establishing or improving requirement-quality frameworks, traceability, defect RCA processes, or software quality metrics.