Product Owner

Position Summary

The Product Owner is responsible for understanding business problems, identifying opportunities for improvement, and translating those needs into practical software solutions that create measurable value for Perform[cb], our internal teams, advertisers, and affiliate partners.

This role acts as a bridge between business stakeholders, users, design, engineering, data, and leadership. The Product Owner will gather context, analyze workflows, define requirements, prioritize development work, and help ensure that the final product solves the right problem in a simple, effective, and scalable way.

As Perform[cb] continues to expand its use of AI, automation, and data-driven decision-making, this role requires someone who is comfortable using AI tools to move faster. The ideal candidate can use AI to support research, documentation, prototyping, data exploration, workflow design, solution development, and product validation.

This role will also help identify opportunities where AI agents, automation, and intelligent workflows can reduce manual work, improve decision-making, increase consistency, and help teams operate more efficiently.

This is not a purely administrative backlog-management role. The ideal candidate is a hands-on problem solver who can understand how the business operates, identify where software can improve a process, and work with engineering to turn those ideas into useful products and features.

Key Responsibilities

Business Problem Solving & Product Discovery

• Understand business problems, user workflows, operational pain points, and company goals.
• Partner with the VP of Product, business stakeholders, and technology leaders to define product priorities aligned with company objectives.
• Work with internal teams, advertisers, and affiliate partners to understand needs, gather feedback, and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Analyze workflows and business processes to determine where software, automation, AI, or better data visibility can create value.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into clear product opportunities, workflows, requirements, and success measures.
• Evaluate product ideas based on business value, user impact, technical feasibility, available data, and expected ROI.

Software Solution Design

• Translate business needs into practical software solutions that are simple, scalable, and aligned with user needs.
• Create clear workflows, user stories, acceptance criteria, business rules, edge cases, and release requirements.
• Think through how a feature should work from end to end, including user experience, data needs, system behavior, operational impact, and post-launch measurement.
• Collaborate with engineering, design, QA, and data teams to clarify requirements, resolve open questions, and make practical trade-off decisions.

AI, Automation & Agentic Workflows

• Use AI tools to accelerate product discovery, research, user-story creation, workflow mapping, documentation, analysis, and requirements development.
• Create lightweight prototypes, mockups, workflow demos, or proof-of-concepts using tools such as Figma, ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, no-code tools, low-code tools, or similar platforms.
• Identify business workflows where AI agents, automation, or guided decision-support tools could reduce manual effort, improve speed, increase consistency, or improve business outcomes.
• Help define the role of human oversight in AI-powered workflows, including when an AI system can act automatically, when it should recommend an action, and when a human should review before execution.
• Work with engineering and data teams to design practical AI-enabled workflows, including inputs, outputs, permissions, guardrails, escalation paths, and success metrics.
• Help define how AI-powered features should behave, including expected outputs, human review points, feedback loops, confidence thresholds, edge cases, and quality measurements.
• Understand the limitations of AI systems, including false positives, hallucinations, inconsistent outputs, model drift, data quality issues, and the need for testing, validation, and ongoing monitoring.
• Stay curious about new AI tools and identify practical ways they can improve product development, internal workflows, and business operations.

Data Analysis & Product Measurement

• Use data to understand problems, validate assumptions, prioritize opportunities, and evaluate product performance after launch.
• Define clear KPIs and success criteria for product initiatives before development begins.
• Use dashboards, spreadsheets, reports, AI-assisted analysis, and available data sources to investigate trends and support product decisions.
• Partner with data, engineering, and business teams to ensure required tracking, reporting, and measurement are in place.
• Analyze product usage, operational metrics, campaign performance, partner behavior, funnel performance, and business outcomes to identify opportunities for improvement.

Backlog Management & Requirements

• Own and manage the product backlog, ensuring priorities reflect business value, urgency, user impact, and strategic alignment.
• Write clear user stories, acceptance criteria, business rules, workflows, and edge cases.
• Ensure requirements are well-defined, testable, and ready for development.
• Collaborate with engineering to clarify questions before and during development.
• Balance stakeholder requests with roadmap priorities, business impact, and development capacity.

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Serve as a key point of contact for product-related questions, decisions, updates, and trade-offs.
• Collaborate with internal teams including Product, Engineering, Marketing, Partner Development, Marketer Development, Account Management, Compliance, Finance, Operations, and Data.
• Translate complex technical, data, or workflow concepts into clear business language.
• Communicate priorities, timelines, scope changes, risks, and product decisions transparently.

Execution & Delivery

• Partner with design, engineering, QA, data, and business stakeholders to deliver high-quality product releases.
• Review and validate product deliverables against requirements and acceptance criteria before release.
• Test features from the user and business perspective to ensure they solve the intended problem.
• Support go-to-market, training, documentation, rollout, and internal adoption activities when needed.
• Monitor product performance after launch and identify opportunities for iteration and improvement.

Continuous Improvement

• Use feedback, data, and product performance to continuously improve features and workflows.
• Help improve product processes, documentation standards, discovery practices, and agile execution.
• Stay current on product management, AI, automation, adtech, affiliate marketing, and performance marketing trends.
• Promote a culture of experimentation, measurement, practical innovation, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• Experience as a Product Owner, Product Manager, Business Analyst, Solutions Analyst, or similar role. We are open to candidates with different experience levels if they demonstrate strong product thinking, business understanding, and the ability to turn problems into practical software solutions.
• Strong ability to understand business problems, user workflows, operational pain points, and company goals.
• Proven ability to translate business needs into clear product requirements, workflows, user stories, acceptance criteria, and development priorities.
• Comfortable using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, or similar tools to move faster in product discovery, research, documentation, prototyping, analysis, and solution design.
• Ability to use AI tools, dashboards, spreadsheets, reports, and available data to investigate problems, identify trends, validate assumptions, and support product decisions.
• Strong analytical mindset, with the ability to ask the right questions, interpret data, and connect product decisions to business outcomes.
• Ability to create lightweight prototypes, mockups, workflow diagrams, or demos using tools such as Figma, AI prototyping tools, no-code/low-code platforms, or clear written documentation.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain business problems, proposed solutions, trade-offs, and requirements to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong organizational skills and the ability to manage priorities across stakeholders, engineering, design, and business teams.
• Experience working with Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or similar product development processes.
• Proficiency with Jira or similar product/project management tools.
• Familiarity with Figma or similar design/prototyping tools is a plus.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Marketing, Data Analytics, or a related field preferred. Equivalent practical experience will also be considered.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in adtech, martech, affiliate marketing, performance marketing, lead generation, mobile app marketing, SaaS, internal tools, workflow automation, or marketplace platforms.
• Experience working on AI-enabled, data-driven, automation, recommendation, fraud detection, anomaly detection, optimization, or decision-support products.
• Familiarity with AI agents, workflow automation, or agentic product concepts, including how AI systems can assist with research, recommendations, task execution, monitoring, and follow-up actions.
• Experience with experimentation, A/B testing, cohort analysis, funnel analysis, or ROI measurement.
• Basic technical fluency, including understanding APIs, databases, event tracking, integrations, data flows, and software development trade-offs.