Product Owner, CEM - Equity

Job Summary 

insightsoftware is seeking a Product Owner to support the Senior Product Manager in executing the sustaining and enhancement roadmap across the Certent Equity Management (CEM) platform. This role spans multiple product domains — batch processing, equity plan administration, ESPP, admin reporting, and financial reporting — and is focused on day-to-day execution: translating strategic priorities into well-defined requirements, managing the sprint-level backlog, and ensuring engineering teams have the clarity they need to deliver high-quality defect resolution and platform improvements. The Product Owner will work hands-on with engineering, QA, Customer Support, and Professional Services to drive bugs, issues, and enhancements from triage through delivery, while the Senior Product Manager retains ownership of overall platform strategy, cross-domain prioritization frameworks, stakeholder relationships, and roadmap direction. This is an execution-intensive role requiring strong cross-domain familiarity with the CEM platform, meticulous attention to detail, and the ability to context-switch effectively across multiple product areas within a single sprint cycle. 

Key Responsibilities 

Backlog Management & Requirements 

• Own and maintain the sprint-level sustaining backlog across batch processing, admin, ESPP, admin reporting, and financial reporting domains, ensuring stories are groomed, prioritized, and ready for sprint planning in alignment with the Senior Product Manager's quarterly roadmap and prioritization framework 

• Write detailed user stories, bug reports, enhancement specifications, and acceptance criteria with sufficient clarity for engineering teams to execute without ambiguity across all five domains 

• Define edge cases, regression scenarios, and validation rules for fixes and enhancements spanning complex workflows — including batch job sequences, ESPP enrollment and purchase cycles, admin transaction processing, report generation, and financial reporting period closes 

• Triage incoming defects and enhancement requests from Customer Support, Professional Services, and direct customer escalations, performing initial severity and impact assessment before escalating cross-domain prioritization conflicts to the Senior Product Manager 

• Maintain a current and accurate defect and enhancement tracker with status visibility for stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Support, and Professional Services 

Sprint Execution & Delivery 

• Serve as the primary product point of contact for engineering teams during sprint execution on sustaining and enhancement workstreams across all CEM domains 

• Participate in all Agile ceremonies — sprint planning, daily standups, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives 

• Accept or reject completed work against defined acceptance criteria, ensuring fixes and enhancements meet the quality bar required for a financial services SaaS platform — particularly for calculation-sensitive areas such as vesting computations, ESPP purchase price calculations, batch-driven corporate actions, and financial reporting outputs 

• Track delivery progress across concurrent workstreams, flagging risks, blockers, and scope changes to the Senior Product Manager promptly 

• Monitor release stability post-deployment, logging regression incidents and coordinating with engineering on hotfix triage when issues arise in production 

• Collect and maintain sprint-level sustaining metrics — defect throughput, story completion rates, escaped defects, and rework frequency — feeding data into the Senior Product Manager's broader platform health reporting 

Cross-Functional Coordination 

• Collaborate with QA to define test scenarios, validate fix behavior, and ensure regression coverage across platform modules for each sprint delivery 

• Coordinate with Professional Services on implementation-related defects, configuration-driven issues, and common onboarding friction points, translating field feedback into backlog items with clear acceptance criteria 

• Support Product Marketing and Customer Success by drafting release note content, known issue summaries, and enhancement descriptions for customer-facing communications under the Senior Product Manager's review 

Documentation & Process 

• Document root cause analysis findings, workaround procedures, and known issue summaries for cross-functional consumption 

• Maintain clear and current product documentation — including workflow diagrams, defect postmortems, enhancement specifications, and regression test expectations — for all sustaining work across the five domains 

• Contribute to PRD development by drafting sections, compiling defect trend data, and documenting technical details for the Senior Product Manager's review and finalization 

• Drive consistency in documentation standards, story formatting, and acceptance criteria quality across the sustaining backlog 

Customer & Stakeholder Support 

• Review and analyze customer-reported issues to identify recurring patterns, helping the Senior Product Manager surface systemic themes that warrant strategic investment 

• Assist in preparing materials for customer advisory sessions, including defect trend summaries, enhancement pipeline overviews, and post-release quality reports 

Required Qualifications 

Experience 

• 2+ years in a product owner, business analyst, or junior product management role, preferably in B2B SaaS environments 

• 2+ years of experience in equity management, equity compensation, or financial services platforms 

• Demonstrated experience writing detailed user stories, bug reports, and acceptance criteria across multiple product domains simultaneously 

• Strong track record of working directly with engineering teams in Agile/Scrum environments, managing sprint-level backlog execution across concurrent workstreams 

• Excellent attention to detail, organizational skills, and written communication abilities — particularly the capacity to context-switch across domains while maintaining requirements quality and consistency 

Technical & Domain Knowledge 

• Solid understanding of equity compensation principles, including stock options, RSUs, RSAs, ESPP, performance awards, and participant transaction lifecycles 

• Familiarity with equity administration workflows — plan setup, vesting, exercises, terminations, corporate actions, and batch processing operations 

• Working knowledge of administrative reporting needs for equity plan administrators and foundational familiarity with financial reporting concepts related to equity compensation (ASC 718) 

• Ability to engage credibly with engineering on defect analysis, data flows, and system behavior across interconnected platform modules 

• Familiarity with JIRA or similar defect tracking and backlog management tools 

Education 

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Information Systems, or a related field  

Preferred Qualifications 

• CEP (Certified Equity Professional) certification, any level, is a plus 

• MBA or similar advanced degree preferred 

• Direct experience with the Certent Equity Management platform or comparable equity administration systems 

• Experience with ESPP administration workflows, including enrollment, contribution management, and purchase processing 

• Experience in a high-growth, fast-paced SaaS company