Lead Product Owner

Caterpillar Caterpillar · Industrial · Chicago, IL +2

Lead Product Owner for Caterpillar's One Funnel initiative, focusing on defining and prioritizing Prioritized Action Lists (PALs) that drive dealer outcomes across sales, service, and operations. This role involves managing the PAL intake, backlog, and cross-domain coordination to ensure alignment with business strategy and consistent delivery of unified system.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the PAL intake process, including triage and classification of requests
  2. Define and manage the PAL backlog, prioritizing across domains
  3. Resolve cross-product conflicts and duplication (e.g., overlapping PALs)
  4. Align PAL work to business strategy and portfolio goals
  5. Coordinate across product teams to ensure consistent PAL definitions and scope

Skills

Required

  • Business Analysis
  • Decision Making and Critical Thinking
  • Effective Communications
  • Software Change Request Management
  • Software Engineering
  • Software Problem Management
  • Software Product Business Knowledge
  • User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Nice to have

  • Previous experience leading cross-product or portfolio-level alignment and governance, with the ability to drive alignment, surface dependencies, and push teams to collaborate in a structured but pragmatic way
  • Experience owning product structure and data discipline at scale, ensuring consistency in definitions, field ownership, and dependencies across multiple teams and domains
  • Proven ability to operate in ambiguous environments, establishing intake, prioritization, and release processes where none exist and bringing clarity, structure, and discipline without over-engineering