Sr. Project Manager / Product Owner

Partial on site in Union Square 2-3 days per week.

Technical Product Owner / Project Manager - Customer Communications & Outage Platform

We are seeking an experienced, hands-on Technical Product Owner / Project Manager to join a high-visibility team responsible for customer communications and transformational platform initiatives. In this dual PM/PO role, you will serve as the core operational link between business leadership, internal client departments, and technical engineering teams. You will manage enhancement backlogs, gather and translate complex business requirements into technical specifications, and ensure the reliable delivery of time-sensitive customer notifications across multiple channels (SMS, email, voice/IVR, web, and mobile platforms).

• Product Ownership & Backlog Grooming: Lead the gathering, drafting, and refinement of business rules, functional specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria. Maintain and prioritize the product enhancement backlog within Jira/Azure DevOps.
• Multi-Channel Communication Execution: Drive the delivery of customer-facing messaging initiatives, ensuring seamless, automated, and time-sensitive outbound notifications across SMS, email, voice, web, and mobile channels.
• Business-to-IT Liaison: Act as the primary bridge across non-technical business units and technical development teams, speaking with authority to both parties to translate business goals into actionable deliverables.
• Vendor Management & UAT Oversight: Coordinate with internal stakeholders and external vendors (onshore and offshore) to define requirements, track deliverables, manage integration dependencies, and lead User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to validate deployment readiness.
• Project Delivery & Governance: Own project lifecycles from kickoff to post-launch validation, tracking RAID risks and dependencies, and providing executive status reporting and operational dashboards.
• Operational Adaptability & Off-Hours Support: Support cross-functional operational needs, including compliance considerations (e.g., TCPA messaging rules) and participating in a shared rotation for off-hours/evening support during critical customer outage or emergency situations.

• Professional Experience: 5-12 years of hands-on experience as a Product Owner (PO), Product Manager (PM), Business Analyst (BA), or Technical Project Manager (TPM) in a fast-paced enterprise environment.
• Customer Communications & CX Background: Demonstrated success supporting multi-channel customer communications programs, notification engines, or customer engagement platforms with a strong focus on customer experience (CX).
• Agile Proficiency & Backlog Ownership: Proven expertise writing functional user stories, managing backlogs, running sprint ceremonies, and executing hands-on UAT in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Technical Literacy: Ability to understand system integrations, APIs, and data flows between multiple platforms without needing to code personally.
• Vendor & Stakeholder Management: Strong track record coordinating cross-functional teams and holding third-party vendors accountable to strict delivery timelines.
• Location & On-Site Requirement: Located in or near the New York Metropolitan Area with availability for a hybrid schedule (~2 days/week on-site in Union Square, NYC).

• Utility & Regulated Environments: Direct experience in electric, gas, water, or smart-grid utilities, or complex regulated infrastructure environments.
• Emergency & Incident Notifications: Direct exposure to customer-facing communications during emergency, time-sensitive, or service-interruption/outage situations (e.g., Estimated Time to Restore / ETR alerts).
• Customer Communications Technologies: Experience with dedicated notification platforms, automated messaging engines, or IVR routing tools.