SUMMARY:

You are an early-career product professional who contributes to the business outcomes of your product(s). You help teams focus on outcomes over output by understanding customer needs, supporting clear priorities, and enabling trusted, reusable, and discoverable product capabilities. You contribute to the product vision and serve as a connector between business, clients, stakeholders, and product teams. In this role, you will help build and evolve data products that establish the foundation for scalable analytics, self-service data use, and future AI-enabled capabilities.

Develops a clear view of how the product maps to outcomes: Revenue, established KPIs, learnings from customers, adoption, usability, and value to the organization (Kroger & 84.51°).

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Contributes to product portfolio strategy that balances business need, customer value, opportunity, feasibility, and achievability.
• Uses analytics, research, customer feedback, and product data to support product team decisions.
• Reframes business needs into product solutions and reusable data capabilities.
• Contributes to a shared understanding of product vision and strategy across business, clients, stakeholders, and product teams.
• Drives business value for the team by helping prioritize and order product backlog items based on the product roadmap.
• Supports effective management of the team's product backlog and helps ensure it is transparent, visible, and clearly communicated.
• Translates business needs and requirements into effective features and stories that are ready for development.
• Outlines clear acceptance criteria to communicate the definition of done, including relevant data quality and usability expectations.
• Builds and manages stakeholder relationships to support alignment and drive change.
• Develops working knowledge of quantitative and qualitative product data to inform product decisions and the roadmap.
• Develops a good understanding of the business domain, stakeholders, data, business processes, and constraints in which the product(s) operate.
• Develops an understanding of customer and user problems, how they work, and the platforms, technology, and data they use.
• Understands and communicates organizational objectives, strategies, and solution needs to help the team deliver results.
• Identifies, manages, and communicates dependencies and risks, including risks related to data quality, ownership, access, and usage.

Accountabilities

• Contributes to understanding how the product creates value for customers and the organization.
• Contributes to product enhancements and the high-level roadmap.
• Applies business value prioritization criteria and supports continuous refinement of the prioritization approach.
• Aggregates business needs into platform and data-product capabilities.
• Defines, tracks, and uses success metrics, including measures of adoption, usability, quality, and business value.

Technical Collaboration

• Demonstrates product thinking by abstracting feature requests into classes of problems.
• Develops enough technical understanding to recognize when technical choices may conflict with the product vision or customer outcomes.
• Supports the creation of extensible product and data capabilities that can serve a variety of current and future needs.
• Partners with Engineering and Architecture leads so product and technology decisions are made collaboratively.
• Builds foundational knowledge of data products, metadata, data quality, lineage, discoverability, and governance, and understands how trusted, well-documented data enables analytics and AI capabilities.
• Research & Competitive Intelligence
• Continuously discovers what customers and users need, including how they find, understand, access, and use data.
• Engages with clients and users to build knowledge of how the product is used, where data creates friction, and what emerging needs should inform the roadmap.

Communication

• Communicates the value proposition and helps stakeholders and the team connect product work to customer and business outcomes.
• Nurtures communication with stakeholders to help keep product strategy aligned with business priorities.
• Ensures product and value-stream messaging is communicated clearly to the product team.
• Keeps stakeholders informed of customer learnings, product data, and risks that may affect product direction.
• Articulates how the product supports business strategy and creates value for internal and external stakeholders.

Partners

• Product managers, to maintain alignment with business and customer goals and expected outcomes.
• Engineering and Architecture, so product and technology decisions are made collaboratively and support scalable, trusted data capabilities.
• The ecosystem in which the product(s) exists, including business partners, users, data owners, data stewards, analysts, subject matter experts, stakeholders, and executives across Kroger and 84.51°.
• Experience Design (XD), to share, understand, and collaborate on research learnings and product usability.

 Clients

• Business stakeholders and function leads and, in turn, their clients and end users, including consumers of data, analytics, and AI-enabled capabilities.

QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS, AND EXPERIENCE:

• 0 - 2 years of relevant experience, including internships, academic projects, or equivalent experience.
• Developing strategic and critical thinking skills.
• Visual communication and storytelling.
• Ability to work through ambiguity and changing priorities.
• Creative problem-solving and curiosity.
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills.
• Emerging leadership skills and the ability to motivate others through shared purpose.
• Developing business acumen and an interest in connecting product work to measurable outcomes.
• Understanding of customer value propositions and basic product positioning.
• Familiarity with customer research methods and a willingness to learn through direct user engagement.
• Familiarity with data and analysis, including basic concepts such as data quality, metadata, documentation, lineage, ownership, and discoverability.
• Exposure to developing or supporting software, platform, analytics, or data products in an agile environment with cross-functional teams.
• Exposure to product discovery, hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative customer research, or academic and project-based equivalents, with an ability to connect work to business outcomes and learning goals.
• Ability to support stakeholder alignment on business vision and priorities and communicate context to delivery teams.
• Ability to build knowledge of and empathy for customer and user problem spaces, and to support research goals that align with business objectives.

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