Product Owner

Manulife is redefining our US Retirement business to enhance customer savings for retirement. The Product Owner partners closely with Product Managers, Business Analysts, and key stakeholders to understand strategic priorities and translate them into clear, actionable plans for delivery.

Acting as the voice of the business and customer, the Product Owner guides the delivery of value through an Agile model, ensuring work is aligned to customer needs, business outcomes, and enterprise priorities. This role is critical in connecting strategy to execution, managing complex dependencies, and driving measurable results that support the US Retirement vision, strategy, and OKRs.

If you enjoy a dynamic, highly collaborative environment, this is the place for you!

Position Responsibilities:

• Own and prioritize the squad backlog; translate business needs into clear user stories with detailed acceptance criteria.

• Ensure user stories are well-defined, properly scoped, and ready for development team intake.

• Partner with stakeholders, UX/Design, Operations, and engineering teams to refine requirements and deliver customer-centric solutions.

• Support Agile ceremonies, including backlog refinement, sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives, while providing ongoing clarification to delivery teams.

• Define test scenarios and acceptance criteria; collaborate with QA and participate in User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to ensure quality delivery.

• Act as the primary liaison between business stakeholders and the delivery team, managing priorities, risks, dependencies, and issue resolution.

• Lead or support initiatives involving business process transformation, platform implementations, plan conversions, or data migration efforts, ensuring business requirements and operational impacts are fully understood.

• Analyze business processes, data flows, operational impacts, and cross-functional dependencies to support successful solution delivery and implementation readiness.

• Coordinate testing, validation, deployment readiness, and post-implementation support activities to ensure successful business outcomes.

• Provide clear and effective communication regarding progress, risks, decisions, and delivery milestones.

• Drive continuous improvement through feedback, metrics, lessons learned, and iterative delivery practices.

• Minimum 5 years of experience in product, business analysis, operations, project delivery, or related business functions, including 2+ years supporting Agile/SAFe teams as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, or similar role.

• Experience owning and prioritizing backlogs, developing user stories, and supporting end-to-end delivery.

• Strong stakeholder management, communication, facilitation, and problem-solving skills.

• Demonstrated ability to manage complex business and technology dependencies across multiple teams.

• Experience supporting requirements gathering, UAT, release readiness, implementation, and post-production support.

• Experience supporting business transformation, platform modernization, conversion, migration, or implementation initiatives preferred.

• Knowledge of business process analysis, operational impacts, data mapping, data validation, reconciliation, and implementation of readiness activities is a plus.

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.
• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.
• As part of our global team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see.

The role being advertised is an existing vacancy., Manulife/John Hancock offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension/401(k) savings plans and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in the U.S. includes up to 11 paid holidays, 3 personal days, 150 hours of vacation, and 40 hours of sick time (or more where required by law) each year, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence.

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.