Product Owner (Hybrid)

About Rewards Network

For 41 years, Rewards Network has been helping restaurants grow revenue, increase traffic, and boost customer engagement through innovative financial, marketing services, and premier dining rewards programs. By offering unique card-linked offers, we introduce diners to fantastic restaurant experiences, leveraging advanced technology and data analytics to deliver value to restaurants, diners, and our strategic partners' loyalty programs.

Our Culture

At Rewards Network, you'll be part of a driven and diverse team that excels in collaboration, issue resolution, and taking ownership of both personal growth and the company's success. We take pride in partnering with the world's most powerful loyalty programs to drive full-price paying customers to local restaurants through marketing services and flexible funding options. Our engaging and rewarding environment is designed to help you gain your full potential.

Job Overview

The Product Owner supports the execution of the platform product roadmap by translating business requirements into development-ready work across multiple backend engineering teams. This role exists to bridge the gap between business stakeholders and engineering — ensuring development teams have clear, prioritized stories, well-defined acceptance criteria, and a continuously refined backlog. The Product Owner reports to the Platform Product Manager and is responsible for keeping delivery on track across three engineering squads focused on transaction processing, merchant data management, and internal operations tooling.

This is a hybrid position and requires in-office presence Tuesday through Thursday each week in Chicago.

What you’ll bring to the table: (Responsibilities)

• Write, refine, and maintain detailed user stories and acceptance criteria for multiple backend engineering teams, ensuring all stories are ready for dev and clearly define the expected business outcome before development begins.
• Partner with the Product Leadership, Product Managers, and internal business stakeholders — including operations, data, and finance teams — to gather, document, and clarify requirements, translating complex business needs into well-scoped development work.
• Manage and prioritize product backlogs across three engineering squads, maintaining alignment between short-term delivery commitments and the broader product roadmap.
• Participate in all Agile ceremonies across assigned engineering teams, including planning, daily standups, story sizing, retrospectives, and serving as the primary product representative in those sessions.
• Proactively identify and resolve impediments that block engineering progress, including requirements gaps, cross-team dependencies, and misaligned stakeholder expectations, keeping teams on task and unblocked.
• Provide occasional support on production issues, partnering with engineering and operations to triage incidents, clarify business impact, and help coordinate resolution and stakeholder communication.
• Define and validate acceptance criteria for delivered features & capabilities, leading and/or participating in user acceptance testing (UAT) and business demos to confirm that software meets stated business requirements before release.
• Develop and maintain a deep working knowledge of the company’s card network data integrations, merchant enrollment processes, transaction processing platform, and internal operational workflows to effectively represent business needs in development conversations.
• Break down large, complex product initiatives into manageable, independently deliverable pieces of work; facilitate story mapping sessions with engineering leads and stakeholders to sequence delivery logically.
• Support the Product Manager(s) in go-to-market planning activities, release communications, and cross-functional coordination as platform features approach production deployment.
• Maintain up-to-date documentation in project management and wiki tools (Jira, Confluence) to ensure requirements, decisions, and roadmap status are accessible and current for all stakeholders.

• Leverage AI tools and workflows to increase the velocity and quality of product work — drafting and refining user stories and acceptance criteria, synthesizing stakeholder input, identifying requirements gaps and dependencies, generating test scenarios, and keeping backlog and delivery documentation current — while validating outputs with business and engineering partners.

• AI-native and proficient with modern AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Glean, Claude) to accelerate day-to-day product ownership — translating ambiguous business needs into clear development-ready requirements, summarizing decisions, surfacing risks and blockers, and improving story and acceptance-criteria quality — with careful attention to accuracy, privacy, security, and responsible use.

Do you have the right mix of ingredients: (Requirements)

• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to translate complex technical and business concepts clearly for both engineering and executive audiences.
• Proficient in Agile/Kanban frameworks with hands-on experience running backlog grooming, story planning, and story sizing sessions across multiple engineering teams simultaneously.
• Skilled in writing user stories and acceptance criteria, preferably in Given/When/Then (Gherkin) format; comfort with ambiguity and ability to drive requirements to resolution independently.
• Experience with Jira for backlog management, sprint tracking, and workflow configuration; Confluence experience preferred for requirements and decision documentation.
• Analytical mindset with ability to evaluate tradeoffs, assess business value, and make data-informed prioritization recommendations grounded in stakeholder input.
• Ability to build trusted relationships with operational, business, and technical stakeholders at all levels, including engineers, operations managers, and senior leadership.
• Commitment to continuous improvement; able to give and receive feedback on process changes, surface new ways of working with business stakeholders during requirements gathering, and partner with engineering teams on improving delivery effectiveness over time.
• Comfortable operating independently in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities; proactive in surfacing delivery risks and escalating blockers before they impact sprint goals.
• Enough technical fluency to engage meaningfully with engineers on backend data flows, API dependencies, and system integration concepts without needing to write code.
• Demonstrated proficiency with SQL and Excel for querying platform data, analyzing trends, and validating business requirements without dependence on engineering or analytics teams.

• 3+ years of experience in a Product Owner, Business Analyst, or related Agile product role, working directly with software engineering teams.
• Demonstrated experience writing user stories, defining acceptance criteria, and managing product backlogs in Jira or similar tools.
• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Education, Certifications and Experience: Preferred

• Experience in a payments, fintech, B2B SaaS, or transaction processing environment.
• Familiarity with card network concepts such as authorization, settlement, merchant enrollment, interchange, or card-linked loyalty programs.
• Experience supporting internal operational tooling or business process automation projects.
• CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) certification or equivalent Agile/Scrum training.
• Experience with Confluence for requirements documentation, decision logs, and team knowledge management.
• Familiarity with PCI DSS and/or SOC 1/SOC 2 compliance standards as they apply to payments and platform environments.

What you’ll love about us:

Comprehensive benefits package, which includes:

• This is a full-time, exempt position and the base compensation for this opening in Chicago is expected to be $110,000-$120,000 annualized, depending on level, candidate experience, skills, and other factors. This position will be eligible for an annual bonus program with a 10% bonus target for total at target of $121,000-$132,000.
• Competitive Paid Time Off and company holidays
• Generous dining reimbursement when you dine with our restaurant clients
• 401(k) plan with a company match
• Two medical plan options- Standard PPO or High Deductible Health Plan (HSA with company match for HDHP participants)
• Partnership with Rx n Go, offering certain prescriptions for free
• Two dental plan options and a vision plan
• Flexible Spending Accounts and a pre-tax commuter benefit program
• Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity Insurance Plans
• Short Term and Long Term disability
• Company-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance, supplemental employee, spouse, and child life insurance
• Employee Life Assistance Program
• Hybrid working space in our state of the art office downtown located by the Metra and Ogilvie train stations
• Catered lunches provided on Tuesday's in our Chicago office