Client: Photon
Position: Search Product Owner
Location: Springfield, MO (Onsite day-1)
Duration: Contract & Full time (
Role Overview
We are seeking an experienced Product Owner to support the delivery of search and catalog discovery capabilities on a B2B digital platform serving professional automotive repair shops and commercial buyers. This is an execution-focused role that sits within the delivery team, partnering with the Discovery PM, engineering architects, and internal product and QA teams to translate roadmap intent into sprint-ready stories, manage the backlog, and ensure high-quality delivery.
The Search PO is the day-to-day delivery anchor for the search and catalog workstream owning backlog hygiene, story quality, sprint readiness, and stakeholder coordination at the feature level. The ideal candidate is a disciplined, detail-oriented PO who can bridge product intent and engineering execution in a fast-paced Agile environment.
Key Responsibilities
Backlog & Story Ownership
Own and manage the sprint backlog for the search and catalog discovery workstream covering parts search, vehicle selection, catalog lookup, product listing pages, product detail pages, pricing and availability, part interchange, kits, and stock order workflows.
Break epics and features into well-structured, sprint-ready user stories with clear acceptance criteria, edge cases, and definition of ready and done.
Facilitate backlog grooming sessions with engineering (API and frontend tracks), architects, QA, and internal stakeholders ensuring stories are technically unambiguous before sprint entry.
Maintain traceability from business requirements through to stories, test cases, and release notes.
Keep the backlog current, prioritized, and aligned to the Discovery PM's roadmap direction at all times.
Delivery Execution
Work within the team's Agile delivery model supporting the end-to-end pipeline from story sign-off through technical design, development, integration, testing, and production release.
Track feature progress at the task level across API build, frontend build, integration, QA, and bug-fix cycles. Escalate blockers proactively and without delay.
Support sprint ceremonies planning, daily standups, reviews, and retrospectives ensuring the team maintains delivery velocity and transparency.
Coordinate stakeholder touchpoints per feature ensuring the right reviewers and approvers are engaged at the right stages of the delivery pipeline.
Manage JIRA as the single source of truth story status, acceptance criteria, defect linkage, and release tracking.
Search & Catalog Domain Execution
Translate Discovery PM direction into executable delivery items across search and catalog features parts search, vehicle-based lookup, catalog enrichment, PLP and PDP attributes, pricing and availability, part interchange, kits, and stock order initiation.
Validate acceptance criteria against professional buyer workflows ensuring stories correctly reflect shop, vehicle, fitment, pricing, and ordering scenarios.
Support data model design reviews and API specification walkthroughs as part of the technical design gate process.
Work with the search platform team to define and validate relevance, ranking, and catalog quality requirements at the story level.
Quality & Release Readiness
Coordinate UAT preparation test data setup, test case review, and defect triage.
Ensure each feature meets integration and end-to-end gate requirements before advancing to regression and user acceptance testing.
Partner with QA to define test scenarios that cover edge cases, fitment logic, pricing rules, and catalog data quality.
Support post-launch monitoring tracking defect resolution, feature adoption, and catalog quality metrics in the immediate post-release window.
Required Qualifications
5+ years of Product Owner or Business Analyst experience in e-commerce, enterprise SaaS, or digital platform delivery.
Hands-on experience writing user stories and acceptance criteria (BDD format) for complex, API-integrated product features in JIRA and Confluence.
Strong understanding of product listing and detail page experiences attribute management, pricing display, availability logic, and catalog data requirements.
Experience in Agile/Scrum environments sprint planning, grooming, standups, reviews, and retrospectives.
Ability to collaborate directly with API and frontend engineering teams on technical requirements, integration specifications, and defect resolution.
Strong attention to detail ability to manage large backlogs across multiple epics concurrently without losing story quality or prioritization clarity.
Excellent communication skills able to manage stakeholder expectations, surface blockers clearly, and keep delivery moving.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience in B2B e-commerce, automotive aftermarket, parts commerce, or procurement platforms familiarity with vehicle selection, fitment logic, part interchange, catalog complexity, and B2B buyer workflows is a strong plus.
Working knowledge of search and catalog platforms (Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, or similar) understanding of indexing, relevance tuning, faceted search, and query pipelines from a product and delivery perspective.
Familiarity with pricing and availability services in a commerce context real-time P&A integration, tiered pricing, and inventory visibility.
Experience with headless commerce, MFE (Micro Frontend) architectures, and API-first platform delivery.
Exposure to cloud-based platform infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and release management tooling.
Experience coordinating analytics instrumentation and working with QA and data teams on test coverage and product dashboards.
