Product Owner (Hybrid)

About Rewards Network For 41 years, Rewards Network has been helping restaurants grow revenue, increase traffic, and boost customer engagement through innovative financial, marketing services, and premier dining rewards programs. By offering unique card-linked offers, we introduce diners to fantastic restaurant experiences, leveraging advanced technology and data analytics to deliver value to restaurants, diners, and our strategic partners' loyalty programs. Our Culture At Rewards Network, you'll be part of a driven and diverse team that excels in collaboration, issue resolution, and taking ownership of both personal growth and the company's success. We take pride in partnering with the world's most powerful loyalty programs to drive full-price paying customers to local restaurants through marketing services and flexible funding options. Our engaging and rewarding environment is designed to help you gain your full potential. Job Overview The Product Owner supports the execution of the platform product roadmap by translating business requirements into development-ready work across multiple backend engineering teams. This role exists to bridge the gap between business stakeholders and engineering — ensuring development teams have clear, prioritized stories, well-defined acceptance criteria, and a continuously refined backlog. The Product Owner reports to the Platform Product Manager and is responsible for keeping delivery on track across three engineering squads focused on transaction processing, merchant data management, and internal operations tooling. This is a hybrid position and requires in-office presence Tuesday through Thursday each week in Chicago. What you’ll bring to the table: (Responsibilities) • Write, refine, and maintain detailed user stories and acceptance criteria for multiple backend engineering teams, ensuring all stories are ready for dev and clearly define the expected business outcome before development begins. • Partner with the Product Leadership, Product Managers, and internal business stakeholders — including operations, data, and finance teams — to gather, document, and clarify requirements, translating complex business needs into well-scoped development work. • Manage and prioritize product backlogs across three engineering squads, maintaining alignment between short-term delivery commitments and the broader product roadmap. • Participate in all Agile ceremonies across assigned engineering teams, including planning, daily standups, story sizing, retrospectives, and serving as the primary product representative in those sessions. • Proactively identify and resolve impediments that block engineering progress, including requirements gaps, cross-team dependencies, and misaligned stakeholder expectations, keeping teams on task and unblocked. • Provide occasional support on production issues, partnering with engineering and operations to triage incidents, clarify business impact, and help coordinate resolution and stakeholder communication. • Define and validate acceptance criteria for delivered features & capabilities, leading and/or participating in user acceptance testing (UAT) and business demos to confirm that software meets stated business requirements before release. • Develop and maintain a deep working knowledge of the company’s card network data integrations, merchant enrollment processes, transaction processing platform, and internal operational workflows to effectively represent business needs in development conversations. • Break down large, complex product initiatives into manageable, independently deliverable pieces of work; facilitate story mapping sessions with engineering leads and stakeholders to sequence delivery logically. • Support the Product Manager(s) in go-to-market planning activities, release communications, and cross-functional coordination as platform features approach production deployment. • Maintain up-to-date documentation in project management and wiki tools (Jira, Confl…