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Job Description
Role: Delivery Lead Location: Hybrid in Cottage Grove, MN, onsite 3 days per week Duration: 6 months to start Rate: $58.79-$70.55/hour W2, dependent on skills and qualifications
Position Overview The Delivery Lead is responsible for driving cross-functional product delivery from planning through execution, ensuring teams remain focused on business priorities and deliver against commitments. Working closely with the Business Product Owner, this individual will help translate business priorities into actionable delivery plans, manage competing priorities, identify and resolve risks and dependencies, and hold contributors accountable for outcomes. This role requires more than facilitating an Agile process. The Delivery Lead must be comfortable taking ownership, making decisions, challenging assumptions, pushing back when necessary, and driving work forward when there is ambiguity or competing priorities. The successful candidate will bring a product and delivery mindset, using Agile practices as a framework to achieve business outcomes rather than focusing primarily on Agile ceremonies or process.
Key Responsibilities Product & Delivery Leadership - Drive delivery across multiple teams and workstreams from planning through execution and completion.
- Partner closely with the Business Product Owner to translate business objectives and product priorities into actionable delivery plans.
- Help prioritize work based on business value, urgency, dependencies, capacity, and strategic objectives.
- Define and maintain delivery plans, including scope, milestones, timelines, dependencies, and expected outcomes.
- Make recommendations and drive decisions when priorities, requirements, or paths forward are unclear.
- Identify competing priorities and facilitate the tradeoff decisions necessary to keep delivery moving.
- Maintain focus on business and product outcomes, not simply completion of Agile activities.
Accountability & Execution - Hold cross-functional contributors and stakeholders accountable for commitments, timelines, capacity, and deliverables.
- Proactively identify work that is at risk and intervene before issues impact delivery.
- Push back appropriately when scope, priorities, timelines, or expectations threaten successful delivery.
- Remove barriers and drive resolution of issues rather than allowing unresolved dependencies or decisions to stall progress.
- Operate effectively without direct authority by building credibility, influencing stakeholders, and creating clear ownership.
- Demonstrate initiative and a bias toward action, particularly when navigating ambiguity or incomplete information.
Backlog & Prioritization - Partner with the Business Product Owner to maintain a healthy, prioritized backlog aligned with business strategy.
- Help evaluate competing requests and determine sequencing based on business value, capacity, risk, dependencies, and delivery impact.
- Ensure teams understand priorities, expected outcomes, and what needs to be delivered.
- Adjust delivery plans as business priorities, capacity, risks, or dependencies change.
- Ensure backlog decisions and changes remain transparent across stakeholders and delivery teams.
Cross-Functional Leadership & Stakeholder Management - Lead collaboration across business, product, technology, and other cross-functional teams.
- Build strong relationships while maintaining accountability for delivery commitments.
- Communicate delivery status, risks, dependencies, decisions, and changes clearly to stakeholders and leadership.
- Navigate competing stakeholder priorities and facilitate decisions when alignment is needed.
- Influence and challenge stakeholders constructively without relying on direct reporting authority.
- Create transparency around what is on track, what is at risk, and where decisions or intervention are required.
Risk, Dependency & Quality Management - Proactively identify delivery risks, dependencies, capacity constraints, and potential roadblocks.
- Develop mitigation and contingency plans and ensure issues have clear owners and resolution paths.
- Monitor delivery quality and ensure work meets agreed-upon expectations before completion.
- Escalate issues appropriately while remaining accountable for driving them toward resolution.
Agile Delivery - Use Agile practices to support effective product delivery, planning, prioritization, and continuous improvement.
- Facilitate sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and other ceremonies as appropriate.
- Ensure Agile practices support efficient delivery rather than becoming the primary focus of the role.
- Remove impediments and continuously identify opportunities to improve team execution and throughput.
Required Skills & Experience - 3+ years of experience in product delivery, product management, product ownership, delivery leadership, or project/program delivery with direct accountability for outcomes.
- Demonstrated experience owning or driving cross-functional delivery from planning through execution.
- Experience managing scope, timelines, priorities, risks, dependencies, capacity, and delivery commitments.
- Demonstrated ability to prioritize work and make or influence tradeoff decisions based on business value.
- Experience holding teams and stakeholders accountable without direct authority.
- Strong examples of making decisions and moving work forward in ambiguous or changing environments.
- Ability to push back, challenge assumptions, and influence stakeholders while maintaining productive relationships.
- Strong business judgment, initiative, communication, and problem-solving skills.
- Experience partnering with Product Owners, Product Managers, business stakeholders, and technical teams.
- Working knowledge of Agile delivery practices and experience operating within Agile product teams.
- Ability to communicate delivery status, risks, decisions, and priorities effectively to both technical and business audiences.
Desired Skills & Experience - Previous experience as a Product Manager, Product Owner, Technical Product Owner, Product Delivery Lead, Delivery Lead, or similar product-centric delivery role.
- Experience working in a product-centric organization.
- Experience supporting or delivering data products or data-related initiatives.
- Experience working across multiple teams or complex cross-functional initiatives.
- Experience with tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, or similar product/delivery management platforms.
- Experience working in environments where priorities, requirements, and delivery plans evolve frequently.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field.
Ideal Candidate The ideal candidate is a delivery owner, not simply an Agile facilitator. They know how to build strong relationships while still challenging teams and stakeholders when commitments are at risk. They are comfortable making decisions without having every answer, can bring structure to ambiguity, and know when to push for a decision rather than allowing an issue to remain unresolved. They can speak specifically about what they owned, decisions they made, tradeoffs they navigated, stakeholders they influenced, problems they resolved, and the business or product outcomes they helped deliver. Candidates whose experience is primarily Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Release Train Engineer (RTE), or Agile transformation may have relevant skills, but this position requires demonstrated product and delivery ownership beyond Agile facilitation, coaching, ceremonies, and process management.
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