Job Description
Product Owner
Department: Product
Reports To: Vice President, Product & Strategy
Location: Austin, TX
Schedule: Full-time | Hybrid Required (2–3 days in office)
About TogetherWork
TogetherWork is a leading provider of vertical SaaS solutions, helping associations, nonprofits, and local governments run smarter, more connected communities. Our Municipalities vertical delivers purpose-built software to city and county governments, enabling them to manage permits, licensing, code enforcement, citizen engagement, and more — all on a single, modern platform.
We are a product-led organization committed to deeply understanding our customers and building software that genuinely improves the way local government works.
The Role
We are looking for an experienced Product Owner to join our Municipalities team. In this role, you will serve as the critical connector between product strategy and engineering execution. You own the day-to-day delivery: writing clear, well-scoped tickets, maintaining a healthy and prioritized backlog, coordinating with engineering, and ensuring the team ships high-quality work that aligns with our product direction.
You will partner closely with our Product Manager (PM), who sets vision and strategy, while you own execution excellence. This is a hands-on, delivery-focused role for someone who thrives in a fast-paced environment, communicates clearly, and takes genuine pride in getting things done well.
What You’ll Do
Backlog Management & Execution
- Own the product backlog end-to-end: write tickets, define acceptance criteria, resolve ambiguity, and keep work organized and sprint-ready.
- Break down high-level initiatives from the PM into clearly scoped, independently deliverable stories for the engineering team.
- Maintain backlog hygiene — regularly review, groom, re-prioritize, and retire stale tickets to ensure the team is always working on the right things.
- Coordinate day-to-day with engineering, unblock dependencies, and ensure smooth sprint execution with minimal context switching.
Prioritization
- Manage sprint and backlog prioritization, balancing feature work, bugs, and technical debt in alignment with product direction.
- Respond quickly to shifting priorities — reorder the backlog, communicate tradeoffs to the team, and keep execution on track.
- Establish and maintain a structured, repeatable prioritization process, moving the team from reactive to proactive planning.
Bug Triage & Resolution
- Lead structured bug triage: log, reproduce, prioritize, and coordinate fixes in collaboration with engineering and support teams.
- Implement consistent intake processes and standardized templates for bug reports and feature requests to reduce noise and improve signal.
- Track issues to resolution, communicate status to stakeholders, and identify recurring patterns that warrant product investment.
Support Intake & Feedback Loops
- Partner with the customer support team to triage incoming requests, escalate when needed, and group individual tickets into actionable product themes.
- Shift the team from a ticket-by-ticket reactive approach to a theme-based, structured intake model.
- Surface patterns, edge cases, and delivery constraints to the PM to inform roadmap and prioritization decisions.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Coordinate UAT for new features, ensuring coverage across key workflows and that acceptance criteria are fully validated before release.
- Define UAT tiering so that engineering and QA can own appropriate validation, reducing PM bottlenecks and improving release velocity.
- Track release readiness, coordinate go/no-go decisions, and ensure teams are aligned before shipping.
Go-to-Market Readiness
- Support GTM execution by tracking feature completion, coordinating readiness across product and engineering, and ensuring releases are properly scoped and communicated.
- Partner with Product Marketing (PMM) on release planning, providing product context and delivery timelines.
Customer & Market Insight
- Bring execution insights and edge cases from delivery back to the PM to inform discovery and roadmap decisions.
- Participate in targeted customer discovery for specific initiatives — helping validate problems, surface delivery constraints, and refine scope before build.
What You Bring
Required
- 3–5 years of experience as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, or similar delivery-focused product role in a SaaS environment.
- Proven ability to write high-quality tickets and acceptance criteria that engineering teams can execute with minimal back-and-forth.
- Strong experience managing and grooming a product backlog across multiple parallel workstreams.
- Comfortable working in agile/scrum environments; familiar with sprint ceremonies and backlog management tools (e.g., Jira, Linear, Azure DevOps).
- Strong communicator who can translate business needs into technical requirements and vice versa.
- Highly organized, detail-oriented, and capable of managing competing priorities without losing sight of the big picture.
- Collaborative working style with a strong sense of ownership and follow-through.
Preferred
- Experience working with or for local government, municipalities, or civic technology organizations.
- Experience working alongside a Product Manager in a PM/PO split model.
- Exposure to customer discovery processes and user research techniques.
How Success is Measured
In this role, you will be measured on your ability to drive consistent, high-quality delivery. Specific success indicators include:
- Backlog health: sprint-ready ticket queue is maintained, reducing planning overhead and mid-sprint blockers.
- Bug turnaround: a structured triage process is in place and issues move from intake to resolution predictably.
- Reduced PM involvement in day-to-day execution: UAT, ticket creation, and sprint management are owned by you.
- Stakeholder alignment: release communications are timely, tradeoffs are documented, and no surprises at launch.
- Transition from reactive to proactive: intake processes are structured, sprint planning is pattern-driven, and the team operates with predictability.
Why TogetherWork
- Impactful work: build software that helps local governments better serve their communities.
- Clear growth path: a PM/PO operating model that rewards ownership and creates room to grow into broader strategic responsibilities.
- Collaborative culture: a team that values transparency, direct communication, and continuous improvement.
- Flexible, remote-friendly environment with a focus on outcomes over hours.
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