Product Owner Senior Associate

Overview

Own the Retain Cloud product backlog and platform, the firm's resource planning and scheduling system, as primary technical administrator and liaison to the Retain vendor, working closely with US-based stakeholders.

What you'll do

• Own the Retain Cloud product backlog in ServiceNow, capturing, refining, and prioritizing demands, epics, and user stories with clear acceptance criteria.
• Partner with the Retain business owner and business unit leaders to translate business goals into a product roadmap, release plan, and prioritized backlog.
• Lead requirements gathering and backlog refinement sessions, make day-to-day prioritization decisions, and escalate trade-offs that affect scope, timeline, or investment.
• Confirm that delivered changes meet the intended business need and are ready for release, coordinating user acceptance testing (UAT) with business users.
• Track adoption, data quality, and support trends to measure value and guide priorities.
• Serve as the primary technical administrator for Retain Cloud, configuring security profiles, skills, scheduling units, booking components, dropdown values, and other system settings.
• Manage user access and role assignments through the ServiceNow access request process, and support periodic access reviews with business approvers.
• Prepare, run, and validate mass booking and other data loads in UAT and production.
• Monitor integrations and daily data feeds, including worker and skills data from Workday, and coordinate the resolution of feed and data issues.
• Maintain configuration documentation and follow the firm's change management process.
• Act as primary liaison with the Retain vendor: log and track support cases, escalate defects, and monitor vendor SLA performance.
• Review vendor release notes, assess the impact of each Retain Cloud release, and plan and execute regression testing.
• Communicate upcoming releases, resolved issues, and new features to support teams and users, and confirm that incidents addressed in a release are closed afterward.
• Lead configuration and readiness work for business units onboarding to Retain Cloud, including requirements, data migration and reconciliation, UAT, and cutover planning.
• Coordinate the timing of changes and rollouts with business unit operations leaders to avoid busy season and filing-deadline conflicts.
• Develop training materials and job aids, and help resource managers adopt new features.
• Serve as the Solutions-level (L3) escalation point for Retain incidents: reproduce issues in the test environment, capture diagnostics, manage problem records, and provide workarounds.
• Build and maintain the Retain knowledge base so Services and Troubleshooting teams can resolve common issues quickly and consistently.
• Analyze ticket trends to find recurring issues and drive permanent fixes or enhancements.
• Support Retain reporting needs by producing accurate scheduling and resource data for resource managers and leadership.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Business, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 3–5 years of experience in enterprise SaaS application administration, business systems analysis, or product ownership.
• At least 2 years of hands-on experience administering, configuring, or supporting Retain; deep experience with a comparable resource management platform will be considered.
• Comfortable working 5:00 PM – 2:00 AM (IST).
• Experience managing a backlog and writing epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria in ServiceNow, Azure DevOps, Jira, or a similar tool.
• Working knowledge of ServiceNow ITSM and ITIL practices.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills for engaging US-based leaders.
• Ability to work independently with broad direction and little supervision while collaborating across a geographically dispersed team.

Nice to have

• Retain Cloud experience (strongly preferred).
• Experience supporting resource management or scheduling teams in a professional services environment (audit, tax, or consulting).
• Experience with Workday or other HR system integrations and data loads.
• Product Owner certification (such as CSPO or PSPO).
• Advanced Microsoft Excel skills and working knowledge of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.

Details

• Hybrid position based in the Crowe office in Hyderabad, India; must live within commute distance and travel to the office as needed.
• Work during US business hours with flexibility for releases, go-lives, and critical escalations.
• Estimated annual average of 10–15% overtime, required for critical deadlines and busy season months.