Agile Experience Owner (Payments)

Agile Experience Owner

Role Summary
The Experience Owner is accountable for translating customer and business needs into a clear product vision, roadmap, and prioritized delivery plan. The EO serves as a key Agile leader, representing the voice of the customer and partnering with business, technology, design, risk, operations, and Agile delivery teams to maximize customer and business value.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, communicate, and maintain the product or experience vision and roadmap.
• Champion the customer experience and ensure delivered capabilities solve meaningful customer problems.
• Translate strategic objectives into initiatives, epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Own and continuously prioritize the product backlog, balancing customer value, business outcomes, risk, technical feasibility, dependencies, and delivery capacity.
• Define MVPs and incremental releases that allow value to be delivered and validated quickly.
• Partner with Neighborhood Leads, Scrum Masters, engineers, UX/CX, analysts, operations, risk, legal, compliance, and other stakeholders.
• Lead backlog refinement, release planning, product demonstrations, reviews, and related Agile ceremonies.
• Ensure requirements and stories are sufficiently defined and sprint-ready.
• Establish measurable outcomes, KPIs and OKRs, and use customer, operational, behavioral, and delivery data to guide prioritization.
• Review completed work against acceptance criteria and intended customer/business outcomes.
• Communicate roadmap, priorities, progress, dependencies, risks, and results to senior stakeholders.
• Promote an Agile, customer-centric mindset and foster continuous improvement across the team.

Required Characteristics

• General knowledge of wholesale payments systems, including Automated Clearing House (ACH), wire transfers, and Real-Time Payments (RTP), with an understanding of customer use cases, processing flows, and operational dependencies.
• Strong cross-team coordination skills, with the ability to align business, technology, operations, risk, compliance, and vendor partners around shared priorities, dependencies, and delivery commitments.
• Strong team-building and facilitation skills, fostering trust, shared accountability, constructive problem-solving, and effective collaboration across Agile teams.
• Working knowledge of Agile practices, including backlog prioritization, user-story development, acceptance criteria, and incremental delivery.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain business needs, communicate trade-offs, and influence stakeholders without direct authority.
• Customer-focused, analytical approach to prioritization, balancing business value, delivery feasibility, operational readiness, and risk.

Desirable Characteristics

• Experience supporting wholesale payments modernization, platform migrations, or the introduction of new payment capabilities.
• Familiarity with payment initiation, processing, settlement, reconciliation, exception handling, and related controls.
• Experience coordinating delivery across multiple Agile teams, shared technology platforms, and external vendors.
• Ability to build strong working relationships across organizational boundaries, resolve competing priorities, and facilitate timely decisions.
• Experience supporting end-to-end testing, business readiness, release planning, and post-implementation validation.
• Familiarity with payment integrations, APIs, ISO 20022 messaging, and emerging payment capabilities.
• Relevant Agile or product ownership certification, or equivalent practical experience.

This aligns closely with the internal EO definition as well as standard Product Owner practice. Agile Alliance, for example, describes Product Ownership around clearly defining backlog items, prioritizing for maximum outcome, determining whether work was satisfactorily delivered, and maintaining transparency into upcoming work. Atlassian similarly places product vision and backlog prioritization with the Product Owner.

Hours & Work Schedule

• Hours per Week: 40
• Work Schedule: M-F

Pay Transparency

The salary range for this position is $114,000 - $145,000 per year, plus an opportunity to earn additional incentive earnings. Actual pay is based on various factors including but not limited to the budget, work location, and relevant skills and experience. 

We offer competitive pay, comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, maternity/paternity leave, flexible work arrangements, education reimbursement, wellness programs and more. Note, Citizens’ paid time off policy exceeds the mandatory, paid sick or paid time-away policy of every local and state jurisdiction in the United States. For an overview of our benefits, visit https://jobs.citizensbank.com/benefits.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Citizens, its parent, subsidiaries, and related companies (Citizens) provide equal employment and advancement opportunities to all colleagues and applicants for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, citizenship, physical or mental disability, perceived disability or history or record of a disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, genetic characteristic, marital or domestic partner status, victim of domestic violence, family status/parenthood, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, pregnancy/childbirth/lactation, colleague’s or a dependent’s reproductive health decision making, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by federal, state and/or local laws. At Citizens, we are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that enables all colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day and everyone is expected to be treated with respect and professionalism. Employment decisions are based solely on merit, qualifications, performance and capability.

Equal Employment and Opportunity Employer

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Background Check

Any offer of employment is conditioned upon the candidate successfully passing a background check, which may include initial credit, motor vehicle record, public record, prior employment verification, and criminal background checks. Results of the background check are individually reviewed based upon legal requirements imposed by our regulators and with consideration of the nature and gravity of the background history and the job offered. Any offer of employment will include further information.