Product Owner Senior Associate

Job description

Your Journey at Crowe Starts Here: At Crowe, you can build a meaningful and rewarding career. With real flexibility to balance work with life moments, you’re trusted to deliver results and make an impact. We embrace you for who you are, care for your well-being, and nurture your career. Everyone has equitable access to opportunities for career growth and leadership. Over our 80-year history, delivering excellent service through innovation has been a core part of our DNA across our audit, tax, and consulting groups. That’s why we continuously invest in innovative ideas, such as AI-enabled insights and technology-powered solutions, to enhance our services. Join us at Crowe and embark on a career where you can help shape the future of our industry. Job Description: The Retain Cloud Product Owner – Senior Associate is the dedicated product and platform owner for Retain Cloud, the firm’s resource planning and scheduling platform, within the Enterprise Applications Support team. Based in Crowe’s Hyderabad office and working closely with US-based stakeholders, this role combines hands-on administration and configuration with day-to-day product ownership: managing the Retain backlog and roadmap, translating business needs into well-defined epics and user stories, coordinating vendor releases, and driving adoption as additional business units move onto the platform. This position takes Retain beyond break/fix support. The Product Owner partners with the Retain business owner, business unit resource management teams, the Solutions support team, and the Retain vendor to keep the platform stable, secure, and aligned with firm priorities. As Retain moves into steady-state operations, the role will also be cross-trained on other enterprise applications supported by the team. Key Responsibilities Product Ownership and Backlog Management: 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. Platform Administration and Configuration 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. Release and Vendor Management Act as the 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. Business Unit Onboarding and Adoption Lead configuration and readiness work for business units onboarding to Retain Cloud, including requirements, data migration and reconciliation, UAT, and cutover planning. oordinate 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. Support and Continuous Improvement 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. Qualifications: 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 (Retain Cloud strongly preferred); deep experience with a comparable resource management platform will be considered. Experience supporting resource management or scheduling teams in a professional services environment (audit, tax, or consulting) preferred. 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. Experience with Workday or other HR system integrations and data loads is a plus. Product Owner certification (such as CSPO or PSPO) preferred. Advanced Microsoft Excel skills and working knowledge of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. Requirements This is a hybrid position. The selected candidate must live within commute distance of the Crowe office in Hyderabad, India, and be able to travel to the office as needed. Ability to work during US business hours collaborate with US-based stakeholders, with flexibility for releases, go-lives, and critical escalations. Estimate an annual average of 10–15% overtime. Overtime will be required to meet critical deadlines and during busy season months. Excellent written and verbal English communication skills for engaging US-based leaders. Ability to work independently with broad direction and little supervision while collaborating effectively across a geographically dispersed team. Key Positions with Which This Position Interfaces Retain applications for business lead and business unit representatives Business unit resource managers and operations leaders Enterprise Applications Support Solutions team Services and Troubleshooting support teams Retain vendor support and product teams HR technology and data integration teams (such as Workday) ServiceNow platform, project management, and IT leadership teams We expect the candidate to uphold Crowe’s values of Care, Trust, Courage, and Stewardship. These values define who we are. We expect all of our people to act ethically and with integrity at all times. Our Benefits: At Crowe, we know that great people are what makes a great firm. We value our people and offer employees a comprehensive benefits package. Learn more about what working at Crowe can mean for you! How You Can Grow: We will nurture your talent in an inclusive culture that values diversity. You will have the chance to meet on a consistent basis with your Career Coach that will guide you in your career goals and aspirations. Learn more about where talent can prosper! More about Crowe: Crowe Capability Center – India, operating under the legal entity C3 India Delivery Centre LLP (formerly known as Crowe Horwath IT Services LLP) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Crowe LLP (U.S.A.), a public accounting, consulting and technology firm with offices around the world. Crowe LLP is an independent member firm of Crowe Global, one of the largest global accounting networks in the world. The network consists of more than 200 independent accounting and advisory firms in more than 130 countries around the world. Crowe does not accept unsolicited candidates, referrals or resumes from any staffing agency, recruiting service, sourcing entity or any other third-party paid service at any time. Any referrals, resumes or candidates submitted to Crowe, or any employee or owner of Crowe without a pre-existing agreement signed by both parties covering the submission will be considered the property of Crowe, and free of charge. We are committed to a merit-based hiring process, evaluating all candidates consistently using objective, job-related criteria such as relevant experience, demonstrated skills, measurable impact, and alignment with the role’s responsibilities, and making employment decisions in a fair and inclusive manner free from discrimination.