Product Owner

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Introduction:
Who We Are…

ELMO is The Complete AI Workforce Platform built for Australia’s mid-market organisations and trusted by 1.2 million employees.

Founded in 2002, ELMO is the trusted HR software provider to thousands of organisations across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. We’re on a mission to release HR’s full potential, through software automation, analytics, and world-class customer support. Through powerful technology, automation, data and analytics, ELMO Software empowers HR professionals to play an integral role in company decision making.

Life & Culture...

At ELMO you will be joining an epic team with the opportunity to make a big impact. We foster an authentic, collaborative, fun working environment and being an ELMOnian means you're part of an amazing team that will push you to grow, support you with challenges and allow you to shine. Some of our benefits include:

• Hybrid work set up
• Paid Parental leave - 12 weeks primary, 6 weeks secondary
• Birthday leave, YOU day each year, as well as connecting people leave (up to 2 weeks working from anywhere)
• Inhouse Learning and Development initiatives
• ELMO Social and Diversity clubs
• Wellbeing initiatives such as boot camp, yoga etc.
• Mental Health/EAP programs
• Flare Benefits (great discounts, novated leasing, salary sacrifice)

Our values:
Reimagine What's Possible - We believe innovation is human at its core. By staying open, fearless, and adaptive, we continuously push boundaries - while keeping people at the heart of everything we do.
Obsess over Customers – Everything we do is designed to positively impact our customers.
Help Others Thrive - Be they colleagues, communities or customers, we champion ways to help others thrive.
Be Fearlessly Optimistic - We bring unwavering positivity to any challenge, as we know it will drive meaningful change.

Please note: Our internal Talent Acquisition team has got this covered, we’re not open to using an agency for this role.

Description:
As a Senior Product Owner, you hold the single point of accountability for requirements quality. You will bridge the gap between high-level business needs and granular technical execution. Because we leverage AI-Native models, your value lies in your judgment and the absolute precision of your functional designs. Reporting to the Head of Product, the Senior Product Owner is responsible for collaborating with the development team to achieve product goals. This involves working closely with the head of Product, Technical Lead and Engineer and requires an in-depth understanding of customer and business needs, leveraging HR subject matter expertise and then translating these requirements to the development team.

Position Overview:
The Senior Product Owner is the single point of accountability for requirements quality, in an AI-Native model, this remains the highest-leverage role in the delivery chain, AI agents execute specifications literally, including gaps, ambiguities, and errors. The quality of everything downstream is directly proportional to the precision of the business intent the Senior Product Owner articulates.

The Senior Product Owner provides business intent; complete rules, edge cases, validation logic, exception handling, and acceptance criteria in Given/When/Then format. The Senior Product Owner reviews engineer-codified specifications to confirm they faithfully represent business intent. The Senior Product Owner is the business knowledge expert embedded in the squad and owns execution, clarifying business rules, edge cases, and intent as engineers codify the specification, validating business logic at the gate, and managing the backlog. The Senior Product Owner's value is domain knowledge and judgement. While the Senior Product Owner's primary accountability is input quality; the precision of what enters the build pipeline, the Senior Product Owner also participates in post-ship outcome reviews with the Product Manager, contributing domain-level observations on whether delivered features are behaving as intended for customers. This closes the feedback loop from specification back into the next discovery cycle.

Skills and Experiences:
Key Responsibilities:
The core responsibilities of the Senior Product Owner includes but is not limited to:

Requirements:
Accountable for completeness and correctness of all business intent entering the build pipeline.
Owns business logic articulation: complete rules, edge cases, validation logic, and exception handling — expressed with enough precision that engineers can codify without ambiguity.
Owns acceptance criteria in Given/When/Then format — this is business language expressing expected behaviour, serving as the business contract; engineers then codify these into executable tests.
Reviews engineer-codified specifications to confirm they faithfully represent business intent - catches when codification misses a business rule or edge case.
Ensures data model and integration requirements are surfaced within the business intent (schema constraints, API contracts, Kafka event definitions) in collaboration with TTL.
Owns constraint documentation: performance requirements, regulatory obligations, security classification, accessibility standards.
AI drafts acceptance criteria from business rules — PO reviews and refines; the PO's value is domain judgement over AI output, not manual authoring.

Business Logic Validation:
Accountable for verifying the system behaves as specified for every scenario, including edge cases and exception paths.
Owns acceptance of delivered work against acceptance criteria — this is validation, not release sign-off (release sign-off is owned by the PM as part of the three-lead release gate).
Uses AI to accelerate validation — AI runs acceptance criteria against delivered features and flags discrepancies; PO applies domain knowledge to confirm AI's assessment and catch false positives/negatives.

Customer Experience Mapping:
Owns mapping and administration of end-to-end customer experience: sale, onboarding, maintenance, offboarding (NB: for clarity, PO owns the business process map; Design owns the experience layer on top of it).
Acts as secondary Incident Liaison for their product area in the event of a major or critical incident - escalates, coordinates internal response, and ensures timely communication to affected stakeholders.
Prioritises blocker and critical issues in accordance with defined SLAs, ahead of standard backlog sequencing.

Bug Triage & Backlog Quality:
Support owns logging, initial classification, and reproduction of bugs; PO receives confirmed bugs with reproduction steps.
PO owns prioritisation and resolution tracking from confirmed bug onwards: RICE scoring, severity classification, and resolution tracking.
Maintains product area bug quality SLAs: fewer than 20 open bugs per product area and no aged tickets older than 90 days — measured quarterly.
Ensures client services teams are consulted on customer-impacting defects before priority is set
AI pre-triages bugs by severity and customer impact — PO reviews and adjusts based on domain knowledge.
Accountable for backlog items being properly prioritised with clear anticipated delivery dates communicated to internal stakeholders.

Backlog & Work Item Management:
Owns backlog management of specification-ready work items.
Accountable for translation of Product Backlog into increments of deliverable functionality.
Maintains specification-ready items queued at least 2 weeks ahead of team capacity at all times.
AI monitors backlog health and flags stale items — PO validates and acts.

Support Readiness:
Accountable for support readiness: Implementation can implement, Support can support.
AI generates support documentation from specifications — PO reviews for accuracy.

Outcome Participation:
Participates in post-ship outcome reviews led by the PM — contributes domain-level observations on whether delivered features are behaving as intended for customers in their product area.
Surfaces domain signals from bug triage, support escalations, and customer experience mapping that are relevant to whether a shipped feature is achieving its intended outcome.
Feed observations back into requirements for the next cycle — if a feature's real-world behaviour reveals a gap in the original business rules or edge case coverage, PO owns updating the business intent accordingly.
This is participation, not ownership — outcome measurement accountability remains with the PM. The PO's contribution is domain-specific signal that the PM cannot generate from data alone.

Compliance

Ensure compliance with ELMO’s information security privacy policies and procedures.