Tech Product Owner III - Site Reliability Engineering

Medica is a nonprofit health plan with more than a million members that serves communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, and beyond. We deliver personalized health care experiences and partner closely with providers to ensure members are genuinely cared for.

We're a team that owns our work with accountability, makes data-driven decisions, embraces continuous learning, and celebrates collaboration - because success is a team sport. It's our mission to be there in the moments that matter most for our members and employees. Join us in creating a community of connected care, where coordinated, quality service is the norm and every member feels valued.

Role Summary / Purpose

The Technical Product Owner (TPO) is the tactical owner of a team's backlog and capacity. While the Technical Product Manager (TPM) sets strategic direction at the capability level, the TPO ensures the team delivers the highest-value work in alignment with capability priorities. Acting as the single-threaded owner of the team backlog, the TPO bridges business, technology, and delivery execution, consolidating responsibilities traditionally split between a Product Owner and Scrum Master.

The TPO champions Medica's Delivery Framework (MD) by fostering transparency, enabling disciplined delivery, and ensuring predictable flow of work. They shield the team from external disruptions, maintain clarity on priorities, and ensure commitments align with proven capacity.

On the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, the TPO is accountable for maximizing the value, reliability, and longterm sustainability of Medica's reliability, observability, performance, and operational resilience capabilities. This includes balancing runthebusiness reliability work with strategic investments that reduce operational risk and improve service stability.

The SRE TPO applies a strong product mindset focused on solving problems, enabling business outcomes, and ensuring durable systems through:

• Deep understanding of user and operational needs
• Rapid validation and feedback loops
• Relentless focus on value over output
• Consistent, highquality experiences-especially during incidents or degradation events

Key Accountabilities

• Backlog Ownership & Grooming




• Translate prioritized capability epics (from TPM ) into clear backlog items (features, user stories, technical enablers)
• Define acceptance criteria in partnership with the Technical Lead (TL), explicitly addressing reliability, scalability, performance, security, and operability and ensure backlog items are "ready" for development
• Maintain a healthy prioritized backlog sequenced based on value, risk, and dependencies
• Reject or escalate any "backdoor" requests that bypass MDF intake

• Customer Connection & Discovery




• Serve as a primary proxy for SRE customers and users, including application teams, platform teams, and operations partners
• Explore user workflows, operational pain points, and reliability risks to inform backlog priorities
• Ensure backlog items clearly articulate customer impact and operational value




• Capacity & WIP Alignment




• Partner with the Delivery Leader to ensure backlog aligns to actual team capacity
• Account for interrupt-driven work such as incidents, on-call responsibilities, and operational load
• Respect and enforce Work in Progress (WIP) limits so the team is never overcommitted
• Actively remove work when urgent items are added per EDC governance

• Prioritization Integration




• Represent the team during prioritization sessions and ensure EAC and EDC decisions are reflected in the backlog
• Ensure RTB (Run-the-Business) items, enhancements, and strategic initiatives are prioritized together within the backlog

• Sprint & Iteration Leadership




• Lead backlog refinement, sprint planning, and iteration reviews
• Ensure team goals tie back to capability outcomes and enterprise priorities
• Lead all Scrum Master activities, including facilitating ceremonies and promoting disciplined delivery and continuous improvement

• Execution Alignment




• Partner with the Technical Lead (TL) on delivery-the TPO owns the "what/why," at the feature level while the TL owns the "how"
• Make trade-off decisions daily if necessary to keep delivery aligned with priorities
• Coordinate dependencies with other teams and escalate blockers or capacity issues to EDC
  




• Stakeholder Engagement & Feedback




• Act as a point of contact for business and technical stakeholders
• Provide transparency into progress, risks, and delivery metrics
• Ensure feedback loops with TPM, business users are fast and continuous to validate outcomes early
  




• Continuous Improvement & Metrics




• Capture learnings from retrospectives and post-incident reviews, incorporate them into future sprints
• Ensure incident learnings and observability insights feed directly back into backlog prioritization
• Track delivery and flow metrics: say/do ratio, cycle time, throughput
• Validate delivered stories/features against acceptance criteria and business outcomes
• Report progress and risks to TPM, Delivery Leader, and stakeholders

• Accountabilities




• A single, transparent backlog for the team that reflects enterprise and reliability priorities
• Backlog items are outcome-oriented, clear, and feasible before sprint planning
• Sprint commitments align with proven capacity and operational realities, and are delivered predictably
• Completed work delivers measurable improvement to service stability, performance and resilience, and enables business outcomes
• Transparent communication with stakeholders-no surprises
• Provides daytoday prioritization and work leadership for the SRE delivery team

• Role Partnerships in MDF




• With TPM: Translate capability-level priorities into backlog items; align roadmap to team execution
• With TL: Co-lead the team-TPO owns "what/why," TL owns "how"
• With Delivery Leader: Balance team capacity, enforce WIP, and escalate systemic issues
• With Business Owner(s), Consumers & Technology Owners (Capability Teams): Validate backlog items against reliability, operational and business outcomes and secure timely feedback
• With EDC/EAC: Ensure enterprise prioritization decisions are executed accurately at the team level

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in related field
• 5+ years of product related work experience beyond degree

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with SRE, platform, infrastructure, or DevOps teams
• Familiarity with reliability engineering concepts such as observability, incident management, performance, and resilience.
• Experience balancing shortterm operational demands with longterm platform health

Core Competencies

• Product thinking and problemsolving orientation
• Analytical and systems thinking
• Strong communication, negotiation, and stakeholder alignment skills
• Servant leadership and collaboration

This position is an Office role, which requires an employee to work onsite, on average, 3 days per week. We are open to candidates located near one of the following office locations: Minnetonka MN, Madison WI, Omaha NE, and St. Louis MO.

The full salary grade for this position is $88,800 - $152,300. While the full salary grade is provided, the typical hiring salary range for this role is expected to be between $88,800 - $133,245. Annual salary range placement will depend on a variety of factors including, but not limited to, education, work experience, applicable certifications and/or licensure, the position's scope and responsibility, internal pay equity and external market salary data. In addition to compensation, Medica offers a generous total rewards package that includes competitive medical, dental, vision, PTO, Holidays, paid volunteer time off, 401K contributions, caregiver services and many other benefits to support our employees.

The compensation and benefits information is provided as of the date of this posting. Medica's compensation and benefits are subject to change at any time, with or without notice, subject to applicable law.

We are an Equal Opportunity employer, where all qualified candidates receive consideration for employment indiscriminate of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.