Agile Product Owner - International Organisation Health at Cigna

About the Role

The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing value delivery at the Scrum Team level by translating product strategy and priorities into high-quality, executable backlog items. Working in close partnership with the Agile Product Manager (APM), the Product Owner ensures customer needs, business outcomes, and delivery commitments are effectively balanced and realized through predictable, high-quality delivery. The Product Owner acts as the voice of the customer for the Scrum Team and plays a critical role in enabling continuous improvement and value realization.

The role is responsible for IOH backend products across Mainframe and Financial Services domains, including payments, billing, eligibility, and finance operations, supporting internal business processes and integrations. A key focus area will be driving the delivery of reliable, compliant, and scalable capabilities for payment processing, financial reporting, and data integrity, including integration with external vendors and internal platforms and addressing the needs of internal IOH stakeholders such as operations, finance, claims, eligibility, and back-office teams.

Ideal candidate must possess a broad base of skills and knowledge spanning technology, financial operations and healthcare administration within International Health, user experience design, and agile development practices. The individual will work with multiple stakeholders to determine the business and technology objectives for their team and ensure solutions deliver tangible business value.

Key Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with the Agile Product Manager to support product vision, roadmap, and outcomes aligned with business strategy and customer needs.
• Ensure delivery progress and milestones are visible to keep roadmaps relevant and timely.
• Act as the voice of the customer for the Scrum Team, ensuring backlog priorities reflect customer value.
• Translate release train backlog priorities into clear, value-focused team backlog priorities.
• Support Agile Product Manager in the refinement of features.
• Lead the decomposition of features into user stories and ensure ongoing refinement with developers, testers, and business subject matter experts.
• Own Jira backlog quality and approve user stories before moving to Done/Accepted.
• Lead PI planning cycles and objectives to enable predictable execution at team level.
• Collaborate with Scrum Master, QA, and UAT teams to track delivery, quality, and predictability metrics.
• Ensure analytics are in place to monitor utilization, customer experience, and delivery performance.
• Share actionable insights with the Agile Product Manager to drive product evolution and improvement.
• Foster a growth mindset and a psychologically safe team culture.
• Demonstrate an Agile mindset focused on learning, feedback, and value validation.
• Partner with stakeholders to maintain alignment and manage dependencies.
• Drive continuous improvement through data-informed decision making.
• Collaborate with Customer Experience and UX/UI design teams to ensure the customer voice is embedded at all stages of the product delivery cycle.

Required Competencies:

• Strong business and delivery acumen.
• Customer-centric mindset and empathy.
• Ability to translate strategy into executable outcomes.
• Ownership, accountability, and attention to quality.
• Collaboration and stakeholder management skills.
• Continuous improvement and data-driven mindset.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree required
• Strong English language skills required
• Experience working in JIRA tool or an equivalent (preferred)
• Knowledge of agile methodology [preferred/required] (depending on needs, but candidate must either have deep industry / business experience OR Agile delivery experience)
• Experience within healthcare preferred [preferred/required] (depending on needs, but candidate must either have deep industry / business experience OR Agile delivery experience)
• Both technically deep and business savvy enough to interface with cross-functional partners
• Proven ability to develop strong working relationships and establish a high level of credibility across functional and lines of business
• High attention to detail and proven ability to manage multiple, competing priorities simultaneously
• Demonstrates strong decision-making skills and problem-solving techniques
• Demonstrates ability to work independently and as part of a collaborative team in a fast paced and changing environment
• Strong adaptive capability; ability to approach problems pragmatically and creatively in the phase of changing circumstances, resources and direction
• Some degree of flexibility to work with International Health stakeholders across multiple regions and time zones
• Agile Certification: SAFe Product Owner / Product Manager (pre or post hire)