Product Owner

About the Role

The Product Owner supports and progressively expands ownership of the overall digital experience, product needs, and continuous-improvement priorities for one of BSN SPORTS' primary business channels. This role serves as a primary product representative for the assigned channel, partnering with business stakeholders, executive leadership, Commercial teams, customers, frontline employees, and application-aligned Portfolio Product Owners. The position will identify opportunities, evaluate customer and business needs, contribute to prioritization decisions, and translate channel objectives into coordinated product initiatives across BSN SPORTS' digital platforms. Portfolio Product Owners are aligned to applications and platforms including BSNSports.com, My Team Shop, Sideline Stores, and Team Art Locker.

This role is onsite 4 days per week at Farmers Branch TX Varsity Brands HQ.

Key Responsibilities

• Channel Experience & Strategy
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive understanding of the assigned channel, including customers, users, business processes, operational needs, pain points, and strategic priorities.
• Serve as a primary product representative and advocate for the overall digital experience of the assigned channel.
• Partner with business stakeholders and executive management to understand channel priorities and support major roadmap decisions.
• Translate channel strategies, customer needs, and operational challenges into clear product opportunities and prioritized initiatives.
• Evaluate opportunities based on customer impact, strategic alignment, adoption potential, operational value, effort, risk, dependencies, and expected outcomes.
• Maintain and continuously refine a channel-level roadmap identifying major initiatives, experience improvements, capability gaps, and cross-application dependencies.
• Ensure the channel experience remains cohesive when customer journeys span multiple applications, systems, and operational teams.
• Develop a strong understanding of how customer needs, business priorities, and technical feasibility influence product strategy and prioritization.
• Stakeholder Engagement & Prioritization
• Build strong working relationships with channel leadership, Commercial, Operations, Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Finance, Technology, and other business functions.
• Facilitate discussions to understand competing needs, clarify tradeoffs, and contribute to prioritization decisions.
• Present recommendations, supporting analysis, options, dependencies, risks, and tradeoffs to executive management for review.
• Establish transparent prioritization criteria and ensure stakeholders understand how and why initiatives are sequenced.
• Communicate roadmap decisions, initiative status, product outcomes, constraints, and changes to appropriate stakeholders.
• Escalate unresolved cross-channel, cross-application, or resource conflicts to the executive steering committee through appropriate Product leadership.
• Partnership with Portfolio Product Owners
• Partner with application-aligned Portfolio Product Owners responsible for BSNSports.com, My Team Shop, Sideline Stores, Team Art Locker, and other relevant platforms.
• Clearly communicate channel needs, desired outcomes, customer problems, priorities, and success measures.
• Collaborate to determine which applications, platforms, or services should deliver a requested capability.
• Ensure channel requirements are incorporated into appropriate application roadmaps and product backlogs.
• Coordinate initiatives requiring changes across multiple products, applications, or delivery teams.
• Participate in cross-portfolio planning to identify dependencies, sequencing requirements, shared capabilities, and conflicts.
• Balance channel-specific needs with enterprise platform strategies, technical sustainability, and the needs of other channels.
• Customer and User Discovery
• Conduct regular discovery with customers, users, and frontline employees to identify unmet needs, recurring pain points, experience gaps, and improvement opportunities.
• Engage coaches, athletic directors, club owners, collegiate personnel, sales professionals, players, parents, customer-service teams, and operational users as appropriate.
• Use interviews, observation, surveys, journey mapping, usability testing, feedback sessions, support data, and analytics to gather insights.
• Validate that proposed solutions address meaningful customer or operational problems before significant development investment is made.
• Partner with UX, research, analytics, and business teams to develop customer journeys, personas, experience maps, and problem statements.
• Evaluate stakeholder requests against customer evidence, usage data, strategic priorities, and broader channel needs.
• Maintain an organized repository of customer insights, feedback themes, experience gaps, and validated opportunities.
• Initiative Ownership and Delivery
• Lead assigned channel initiatives from initial concept through discovery, prioritization, approval, delivery, launch, and adoption for assigned products, features, or initiatives appropriate to the role's scope and experience.
• Define the business problem, target users, desired outcomes, scope, success measures, assumptions, dependencies, risks, and constraints.
• Partner with Business Analysts, UX, Portfolio Product Owners, Architecture, Engineering, and Delivery teams to establish clear requirements and execution readiness.
• Participate actively in discovery, solution definition, requirements reviews, roadmap planning, UAT, launch readiness, and post-launch evaluation.
• Review proposed solutions to confirm they address the intended channel need and preserve the desired customer experience.
• Support creation and approval of epics, business requirements, user journeys, business rules, acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Coordinate with stakeholders to ensure operational processes, policies, support models, and customer-facing experiences are prepared for launch.
• Backlog and Continuous Improvement
• Create, maintain, and prioritize a channel-level backlog of improvement opportunities.
• Balance strategic initiatives with smaller delivery-ready items.
• Include customer pain points, experience enhancements, defects, technical improvements, operational efficiencies, usability improvements, analytics needs, process improvements, and stakeholder requests.
• Refine backlog items based on new information, customer feedback, performance data, implementation learnings, and changing business priorities.
• Promote continuous product improvement rather than relying exclusively on large projects.
• Analytics and Product Performance
• Define success measures and analytics requirements for major initiatives and feature enhancements.
• Monitor revenue trends and revenue influence, conversion rates, customer and user adoption, feature utilization, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score or other experience indicators, customer feedback themes, user behavior and journey completion, defect and support volumes, operational efficiency, cycle time, feature performance, and release outcomes.
• Use analytics to identify experience problems, adoption barriers, underperforming capabilities, and new opportunities.
• Develop dashboards, scorecards, or regular performance summaries that provide visibility into channel experience and product outcomes.
• Compare actual results with expected outcomes and recommend follow-up improvements when performance does not meet expectations.
• Launch, Change Management, and Adoption
• Develop an adoption strategy for new capabilities, features, and experience changes.
• Partner with Commercial, Sales, Marketing, Training, Customer Service, Operations, and other teams to prepare for launch.
• Help define customer and employee communications, training materials, enablement plans, support resources, FAQs, and launch messaging.
• Track adoption, utilization, customer response, operational impact, and support needs following launch.
• Investigate low adoption or deficient performance and lead corrective-action planning.
• Recommend adjustments to the product experience, communications, training, process, or rollout strategy based on post-launch results.
• Cross-Functional Leadership
• Lead through influence in a matrixed organization without direct authority over business, technology, or delivery teams.
• Create alignment among stakeholders with different objectives, incentives, timelines, and levels of technical understanding.
• Facilitate productive meetings, decision sessions, prioritization discussions, discovery workshops, and executive reviews.
• Communicate complex product and technology topics in clear business language.
• Promote fact-based decision-making, customer-centered design, transparent prioritization, and accountability for outcomes.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Product Ownership: Understanding of digital product management, product discovery, roadmaps, backlogs, prioritization, and product delivery lifecycles.
• Agile Practices: Working knowledge of Agile practices, including epics, user stories, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, UAT, and release planning.
• Tools: Familiarity with Agile product management tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps (ADO), or similar platforms is preferred.
• Technical Understanding: Ability to understand technical concepts, system dependencies, integrations, APIs, data flows, and platform constraints at a level sufficient to support product decisions.
• Data Analysis: Strong analytical skills and ability to interpret product, customer, operational, and commercial data. Understanding of product analytics, adoption measurement, customer feedback, conversion, utilization, and feature-performance evaluation.
• Customer Discovery: Ability to conduct or support customer interviews, user research, journey mapping, surveys, usability testing, and feedback analysis.
• Software: Proficiency with Microsoft Office applications.

Qualifications

• Education & Experience
• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Product Management, Marketing, Information Systems, Business Analytics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• High-potential early-career candidates with strong internship, co-op, capstone project, consulting, product management, business analysis, engineering, technology delivery, or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated interest in digital products, customer experience, Agile delivery, or technology-enabled business solutions.
• Preferred: Master of Business Administration (MBA).
• Preferred: Experience working in a cross-functional or matrixed organization.
• Preferred: Experience supporting digital products, eCommerce platforms, enterprise applications, customer-facing technology, or business transformation initiatives.
• Preferred: Experience working with business stakeholders, customers, frontline employees, product teams, and technology teams.
• Preferred: Experience using analytics and customer feedback to guide product decisions.
• Preferred: Experience supporting product launches, organizational change, training, communications, or adoption programs.
• Preferred: Agile/Product Management certifications (CSPO, PSPO, CSM, PMI-ACP).
• Skills & Abilities
• Strong customer orientation and commitment to improving end-to-end digital and operational experiences.
• Ability to understand the needs of a business channel while recognizing broader enterprise and platform considerations.
• Ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders without direct reporting authority.
• Strong prioritization skills using customer evidence, data, strategic alignment, value, effort, risk, and dependencies.
• Excellent communication, presentation, negotiation, and facilitation skills with the ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, structure complex problems, and move groups toward clear decisions.
• Ability to collaborate with Product, UX, Business Analysis, Engineering, Architecture, Analytics, Delivery, Operations, Sales, and Commercial teams.
• Strong organizational skills with a high degree of ownership, follow-through, and accountability.
• Ability to manage multiple initiatives, stakeholders, dependencies, and priorities simultaneously.
• Ability to balance strategic transformation work with smaller continuous improvement opportunities.
• Strong judgment and ability to recognize when decisions or conflicts should be escalated.
• Demonstrated learning agility with the curiosity to continuously expand product, customer, industry, and business knowledge.
• Ability to write clear, concise user stories, acceptance criteria, business documentation, and product communications.
• Demonstrated customer-first mindset with a passion for understanding customer problems and improving user experiences.
• Highly organized with strong attention to detail and the ability to effectively manage competing priorities.
• Receptive to coaching and feedback with a commitment to continuous professional development.
• Ability to build trusted relationships and work effectively in a highly collaborative, cross-functional environment.
• Self-motivated with strong initiative and accountability for delivering high-quality product outcomes.