PRODUCT OWNER
Houston, TX (On-site)| Technology Department
About the Role
A private, family-owned real estate investment, development, and management company in Houston is looking for a Product Owner to join its core application development team. The company manages a premier mixed-use development and has won multiple awards for workplace culture, including Houston Chronicle Top Workplaces and Houston Business Journal Best Places to Work.
This role reports to the VP of Data & Applications. You will own the product features and roadmap for all internal custom workflow applications while supporting ongoing operations across the full corporate technology stack (custom, SaaS, and COTS).
Your day-to-day is a mix of strategic product thinking and hands-on execution. One week you are facilitating backlog refinement with the dev team, translating business pain into prioritized user stories. The next you are running user research sessions with property managers, sketching wireframes in Figma, and rolling out a new internal platform with training sessions you designed. This is a build-and-operate role: you shape what gets built, ensure it ships, and make sure people actually use it.
What You Will Do
- Own the product roadmap and feature backlog for all internal custom workflow applications, driving development priorities based on user research, business process analysis, and stakeholder input.
- Develop and enhance corporate platforms to improve employee engagement through intuitive design and user testing.
- Create seamless employee experiences and workflows across departmental functions by integrating various platforms into cohesive systems.
- Lead requirement gathering sessions, brainstorming workshops, and user research to inform product decisions with real data, not assumptions.
- Conduct Agile ceremonies: sprint planning, backlog refinement, retrospectives, and sprint reviews with the application development team.
- Implement, integrate, and manage new custom applications and platforms from concept through rollout.
- Build end-user training programs and partner with HR to create the materials that drive adoption.
- Serve as the liaison between technology and business groups, translating technical constraints into business language and vice versa.
- Troubleshoot and resolve technical issues related to product development and integration across the platform ecosystem.
- Stay current on industry trends and best practices in product development, corporate tech platforms, and UX design.
What You Bring
- Bachelor's degree in UI/UX, Business, or Information Systems (advanced degree is a plus).
- At least 1 year of experience in product development as a Product Owner, Business Analyst, or Process Analyst.
- Hands-on experience with UX design tools: Figma, Balsamiq, or Lovable, creating both web and mobile workflows.
- Familiarity with Agile SDLC methodology and experience writing user stories in JIRA or Azure DevOps.
- Experience facilitating user requirement gathering sessions and translating business needs into structured product backlogs.
- Understanding of data platforms, analytics tools, REST-based microservices, APIs, and cloud PaaS environments.
- Strong problem-solving instincts with a track record of driving creative solutions to workflow and process challenges.
- Proven ability to communicate effectively across all levels, from developers to executive stakeholders, and build strong working relationships.
Nice to Have
- Experience in real estate and property management technology.
- Background in corporate platform modernization or enterprise application integration.
- Experience designing and delivering end-user training programs.
