Associate Product Owner (Onsite – Denver)
Summary
Associate Product Owner in Denver bridging engineering, design, and sales to write specs, groom the Jira backlog, coordinate releases, and run QA/testing for a workforce staffing platform.
About the Role
Ideas come from everywhere — customers, sales calls, bug reports, leadership. Someone has to turn all of that into work engineers can actually build. That's this job.
You'll sit between engineering, design, and sales: writing the specs, grooming the backlog, and running releases. It's hands-on and execution-heavy — a strong fit if you're early in your product career, seriously organized, and curious about how software works under the hood.
Key Responsibilities
Backlog & Requirements
- Write clear, detailed acceptance criteria, product specs, and technical/product requirement documents for new features and enhancements (e.g., shift bundling, worker attendance, shift announcements).
- Groom and maintain the product backlog — creating, refining, and prioritizing tickets in Jira so engineering always has a clear, ready queue of work.
- Break large initiatives into well-scoped, buildable features across our mobile and web apps
Release & Sprint Execution
- Coordinate releases from beta through production, tracking scope, status, and readiness across the team.
- Produce and present the recurring sprint report, summarizing shipped work and upcoming priorities for the product and leadership teams.
- Review and provide product acceptance/approval on engineering work to confirm it meets the defined criteria before release.
Quality, Testing & Triage
- Triage incoming product bugs and feedback, reproduce issues, and prioritize fixes with engineering.
- Run regression and QA testing so nothing rough reaches production.
- Investigate data and product issues and partner with engineering to root-cause and resolve them.
Cross-Functional Coordination
- Translate requests from Sales and Customer Success syncs into actionable Jira tickets and follow them through to delivery.
- Act as product point of contact for feature development, coordinating testing, timelines, and rollout.
- Write and maintain customer-facing help content and FAQs, and contribute to feature documentation.
Qualifications
- Required Degree: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, or related field.
- 1–3 years of experience in product, project coordination, QA, business analysis, or a related role — or a strong track record demonstrating the skills below.
- Excellent written communication and the ability to turn ambiguous ideas into clear, structured requirements and acceptance criteria.
- Strong organizational skills and attention to detail, with the ability to juggle multiple workstreams and keep stakeholders aligned.
- Technical curiosity — you don’t need to code, but you’re comfortable reasoning about how software works, reading through logic, and discussing implementation trade-offs with engineers.
- Comfort using AI tools to accelerate work
- A collaborative, proactive attitude — comfortable working on-site with a fast-moving team in our Denver office.
Nice to Have
- Experience with the software development lifecycle in an agile/sprint environment.
- Familiarity with feature flagging, release management, or QA/testing practices.
- Experience writing customer-facing help content or product documentation.
- Experience with product and engineering tools such as Jira, GitLab (or similar), and collaboration tools like Slack and Notion.
What We Offer
- Competitive base salary
- Comprehensive health and dental insurance
- Paid time off
- Professional development opportunities
- Room to grow — increased responsibility and career advancement at a technology-forward company
- A collaborative team environment
About GigSmart
GigSmart is a Denver-based technology company connecting businesses with qualified workers for short- and long-term work nationwide, across every industry. Businesses schedule their core team, fill gaps with a flex crew, and post permanent roles — managing schedules, communication, and payments in one place. More than 4,000 businesses and over 2 million workers are on the platform, in all 50 states
Our team runs on Positivity, Hard Work, Passion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Continuous Learning, in our quest to make the world a better place.
GigSmart is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.