Product Owner Data Governance

Product Owner Data Governance

Industry: Utilities / Energy

Location: New York, NY

Work Arrangement: Remote initially, with a transition to hybrid onsite approximately 1–2 days per week or as needed as the team’s work environment evolves

Employment Type: Six-month contract with potential for full-time conversion

Schedule: 9:00 AM–5:00 PM; Eastern Time preferred

Target Start Date: November 1, 2026

Interview Process: Two rounds

About the Role

Our client is seeking an experienced Product Owner – Data Governance to support its Customer Operations and Customer Analytics teams. This newly created role combines hands-on product ownership, data stewardship, and data quality leadership to improve how enterprise data is governed, maintained, and used.

Working closely with business stakeholders, IT, data owners, analytics teams, and the enterprise Data Governance Office, this individual will translate business needs and data challenges into prioritized roadmaps, product requirements, and practical governance improvements. The role will help establish standards and controls that support current analytics initiatives and emerging AI use cases.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the Product Owner and data steward for Customer Operations data governance and data quality initiatives.
• Maintain a prioritized roadmap of data sources, data products, and governance improvements based on business value and stakeholder needs.
• Own and manage the product backlog, including epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Facilitate backlog refinement and work with business and technical teams to clarify requirements, resolve issues, and validate completed work.
• Operationalize enterprise data governance policies, standards, processes, and controls in partnership with the Data Governance Office.
• Establish and maintain practices for data ownership, stewardship, metadata, quality, security, and usage.
• Maintain the Customer Operations data catalog, business glossary, data definitions, lineage documentation, and data quality rules.
• Establish standards for onboarding and maintaining new data assets.
• Lead data profiling and quality assessments to identify anomalies, inconsistencies, and gaps.
• Partner with IT and data owners to investigate root causes and implement systematic controls that improve data accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability.
• Develop and maintain dashboards and scorecards to monitor data quality, data health, and applicable service levels.
• Lead governance discussions across business, IT, analytics, and data teams to address issues, establish ownership, and prioritize improvements.
• Promote understanding and use of the Customer Analytic Record to support business insights.
• Ensure governance practices support evolving analytics capabilities, new data sources, and AI-related initiatives.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated hands-on experience in both Product Ownership and Data Governance/Data Quality.
• Experience managing product roadmaps and backlogs in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• Ability to translate business needs into clear requirements, epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Experience establishing or operationalizing data governance policies, standards, controls, and stewardship practices.
• Strong data quality experience, including data profiling, issue identification, root cause analysis, and quality controls.
• Experience with metadata management and data catalogs.
• Strong stakeholder management skills across business, IT, analytics, and data teams.
• Ability to identify governance gaps and drive practical process improvements.
• Strong communication and facilitation skills, with the ability to explain technical data concepts to business stakeholders.
• Ability to work independently and influence stakeholders within a complex enterprise environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in utilities, energy, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, or other highly regulated or data-sensitive industries.
• Experience working with an enterprise Data Governance Office or similar centralized governance function.
• Familiarity with Oracle Customer Care and Billing (CC&B).
• Experience with Azure and/or Google Cloud data and analytics environments.
• SQL skills for data analysis, validation, and investigation.
• Experience with data catalog and governance tools such as Collibra, Alation, Informatica, or Microsoft Purview.
• Experience with Power BI, Tableau, or comparable reporting tools.
• Experience supporting advanced analytics, AI, or other data-driven business initiatives.
• Utility industry experience is helpful but not required.