Lead Product Owner

Career Area:

Technology, Digital and Data

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other.  We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

This role partners closely with solution architecture, platform engineering, security, and consumer product teams and is accountable for translating business and developer needs into clear, solution able EPICs and Features (including scope boundaries, dependencies, non-functional requirements, and acceptance criteria) that teams can confidently estimate, build, operate, and support. As a lead product owner, this position drives cross-team alignment, facilitates decision-making, and establishes consistent product practices for platform delivery.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of overall experience, including 7+ years as a Product Owner/Product Manager (including platform products) for a data platform, integration platform, or enterprise platform program.
• Strong experience with Agile/Scrum/SAFe practices (PI planning, refinement, sprint execution) and DevOps delivery.
• Proven ability to lead creation of EPICs, Features, and User Stories with clear acceptance criteria, NFRs/SLAs, and measurable adoption outcomes—ensuring work is solution able and engineering-ready.
• Strong understanding of enterprise systems, dealer integrations, ERPs, and microservices-based platforms.
• Strong understanding of ETL/ELT data pipelines (ingestion, transformation, orchestration/scheduling, data quality, lineage, and operational monitoring).
• Experience delivering in integration-heavy, multi-team environments with complex dependencies.

Principal Responsibility

• A prioritized, delivery-ready backlog of platform capabilities expressed as EPICs and Features that are understandable for solutioning and engineering teams.
• Reusable integration capabilities (APIs, events, schemas, connectors, templates) that reduce duplication and improve time-to-market.
• Improved delivery predictability and platform operability through clear scope, dependency management, and aligned sprint/PI objectives across teams.
• Clearly defined and achieved NFR targets for platform (availability, latency, throughput, resiliency, security/compliance, observability, and disaster recovery), with dashboards and SLO/SLI-based measurement.
• Continuous technical advancements to the platform (modernization, standardization, automation, cost optimization, and improved developer experience) delivered through a measurable, outcome-based roadmap.
• Measurable platform adoption and satisfaction (onboarding success, reuse, throughput, reliability, and developer experience), supported by clear governance and stakeholder alignment.

Key Responsibilities

1) Platform Strategy & Roadmap

• Own and evolve the platform vision, capability roadmap, and adoption strategy aligned to Cat Digital priorities and portfolio objectives.
• Balance near-term consumer needs with long-term platform scalability, reuse, cost efficiency, and operability.
• Drive platform adoption through enablement (documentation, templates, onboarding paths), communication, and measurable outcomes (OKRs/KPIs).

2) Platform Backlog Ownership (Capabilities, EPICs, Features) & Delivery

• Own and prioritize the platform backlog across multiple initiatives/teams, using value, risk, engineering capacity, and dependency-based prioritization.
• Create delivery-ready EPICs and Features for platform capabilities (e.g., APIs, events, connectivity, security, onboarding) with clear scope boundaries, assumptions, dependencies, and measurable acceptance criteria including NFRs/SLAs (reliability, performance, observability).
• Partner with architecture, platform engineering, and operations to lead refinement, sequence delivery, and ensure readiness (Definition of Ready/Done, integration testing, security reviews, observability, and release management).

Key deliverables include:

• Capability briefs for EPICs/Features (context, in-scope/out-of-scope, process/data flows, integration points, dependencies, and success metrics).
• Solutioning and enablement artifacts (context diagrams, sequence/process flows, story maps) plus developer-facing documentation to support self-service adoption.
• Use AI/automation (where appropriate) to streamline product operations such as refinement, requirements summarization, release notes, and adoption/OKR reporting.

3) Stakeholder & Cross-Team Leadership

• Act as the primary product interface for platform consumers (Dealer Systems, ERP, Product teams, Data teams) and internal engineering partners.
• Facilitate discovery, intake, and onboarding alignment (workshops, reviews, demos) and run decision forums to drive clarity on outcomes, scope, dependencies, and operational expectations.
• Influence trade-offs and decisions without direct authority; communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

4) Platform Governance & Standards

• Define and champion platform guardrails (standards, patterns, security, and compliance) to ensure consistent, scalable consumption.
• Productize reusable building blocks (APIs, events, schemas, templates) to reduce custom point-to-point integrations and enable self-service delivery.
• Partner with Architecture to evolve API, event, and data-sharing capabilities, including NFRs (reliability, performance, observability).

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Stakeholder & consumer engagement: Leads workshops, discovery sessions, and demos; builds strong relationships with platform consumers and drives enablement and onboarding.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead various teams without formal authority, mentor Product Owners and Business Analysts, and create consistent backlog and refinement practices.
• Integration expertise: Working knowledge of integration patterns and tooling (e.g., REST APIs, Azure Logic Apps, Service Bus, Data Factory, Dual Write).
• Cloud knowledge: Experience with Azure and/or AWS services in enterprise environments.
• Reporting & analytics: Hands-on experience with Snowflake queries and data analytics for product insights.
• Data pipelines : Familiarity with ETL/ELT tooling and patterns used in enterprise environments (e.g., orchestration, data movement, transformations) to support platform analytics and operational insights.
• Automation & AI: Practical experience leveraging AI (e.g., Copilot Studio) and automation workflows to streamline product operations.
• Agile certifications (optional): SAFe POPM and/or CSP-PO (or equivalent).

 

Posting Dates:

July 8, 2026 - July 8, 2026

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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