Elias Romano Senior Product Owner
Mountain View, CA • elias.romano@gmail.com • +1 650-555-0148
Profile Summary
- Senior Product Owner with 7 years of experience operating in SaaS product organizations across small-business fintech, online learning, and SaaS productivity, specializing in backlog ownership, INVEST-style user stories, and stakeholder-driven release planning.
- Solid background across Agile tooling (Jira, Confluence), product analytics (Amplitude, Pendo), roadmapping (Productboard), design collaboration (Figma, Miro), and frameworks (Scrum, SAFe) with strong fundamentals in INVEST-style user stories, value-based prioritization, and outcome-driven release planning.
- Deep expertise in backlog ownership, value-based prioritization, acceptance-criteria rigor, and release coordination, leveraging methodologies such as INVEST-style story writing and outcome-over-output measurement to drive predictable, valuable, and well-aligned product delivery.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Engineering, UX, QA, Data, and Customer Success teams in dual-track Agile environments, contributing to discovery cycles, sprint ceremonies, and customer-feedback reviews with a user-first, ownership-first mindset.
- Emerging leader who shares technical excellence and fosters a culture of customer-outcome obsession and definition-of-done discipline through story-writing reviews and prioritization office hours, while leading Product Owner guild and story-writing clinics and authoring widely adopted definition-of-ready and acceptance-criteria templates; holds CSPO and SAFe POPM.
Technical Skills
- Agile Tooling & Backlog:
- Jira (advanced filters, JQL, automation), Azure DevOps, Linear, Asana, Monday.com, Confluence, Notion
- Product Analytics & Insights:
- Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap, FullStory, Pendo, Dovetail, A/B test reading, funnel and cohort analysis
- Roadmapping & Strategy:
- Productboard, Aha!, Roadmunk, ProductPlan, OKR alignment, opportunity sizing, value-effort matrices
- Design Collaboration:
- Figma, FigJam, Miro, Mural, design-system collaboration, user journey mapping
- Agile Frameworks & Practice:
- Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, Dual-Track Agile, INVEST story writing, BDD-style acceptance criteria
- Data Literacy & Quant Skills:
- SQL (intermediate), funnel analysis, retention cohorts, dashboarding (Tableau, Looker), spreadsheets (advanced)
- Certifications & Methods:
- CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner), SAFe POPM, ICAgile ICP-APO (in progress), Pragmatic Institute PMC training
- Stakeholder & Communication:
- Executive readouts, sprint demos, customer interviews, written story narratives, RICE / WSJF prioritization frameworks
Education
Work Experience
- Owned the end-to-end product backlog for QuickBooks Small Business Payroll across 3 Scrum teams (28 engineers), leading vision and quarterly roadmap, story-level backlog ownership, and stakeholder alignment for 1.4M small-business users.
- Ran the weekly backlog refinement program in Jira using WSJF + RICE scoring for new epics, dependency mapping across squads, and ready / done definition reviews per sprint, delivering 220 stories per quarter and cutting lead time from 14 weeks to 6 weeks.
- Drove INVEST-style story authoring with acceptance criteria in Gherkin Given/When/Then, definition-of-ready checklist per story, and example mapping with engineers + QA, authoring 640+ stories and cutting story rejection from 18% to 4%.
- Built the stakeholder partnership across the small-business segment through bi-weekly stakeholder syncs with Finance, Tax, and Customer Success, quarterly customer-advisory-board readouts, and written one-pagers tied to each epic, aligning 22 stakeholders across 6 partner teams.
- Facilitated Scrum ceremony facilitation including story-pointing with planning poker, capacity-aware sprint planning, and retro action-item tracking through Jira, lifting team velocity from 34 pts to 58 pts per sprint over 4 quarters.
- Drove the value-driven prioritization program through quarterly OKR alignment with the product VP, capacity split across new features, tech debt, and compliance, and A/B-test-informed roadmap pruning, delivering 14% lift in monthly active small-business accounts across 4 quarters.
- Led release planning and rollout using MVP scoping with engineering and UX, feature-flag-gated phased rollouts, and release notes, in-app comms, and CS enablement decks, shipping 18 major and 60+ minor releases at 94% on-time release rate.
- Embedded as Product Owner inside a cross-functional product squad of 11 engineers, 2 designers, 2 QA, and 1 data analyst, running daily standups with engineers, designers, and QA, three-amigos sessions to clarify ambiguous stories, and UX research sync-ins per discovery cycle.
- Owned story acceptance and sprint demos with acceptance reviews against Given/When/Then criteria, bi-weekly sprint demos to learner-experience stakeholders, and explicit rejection rationale documented in Jira, hitting zero escaped acceptance defects on the learner-onboarding flow across 14 sprints.
- Built the post-release feedback program using weekly review of Amplitude funnel + Pendo NPS comments, monthly support-ticket-trend reviews with CS, and learner interview circles every 6 weeks, delivering week-1 learner retention lifted from 38% to 56% over 12 months.
- Worked closely with Engineering, UX, QA, Data, and Customer Success teams to coordinate dependency planning across 3 learner-side squads, cross-squad acceptance-criteria standards, and quarterly Product Owner guild, authoring 9 product-ops playbooks that shaped the team's standard playbook and mentoring 3 junior Product Owners through their first backlog rotations.