Technical Business Analyst. Columbus LilyLifestyle

Manifest Solutions is currently seeking a Product Owner/Technical BA for an onsite position in Columbus, OH.

• Serve as a central authority in the intake, evaluation, and prioritization of enhancement requests (Rapid requests) and a key influencer in coordinating production support (PSRs) across all business units.
• Play a critical role in driving the critical project work streams, coordinating cross‑functional efforts such as business process automation, data cleanup, process alignment, system readiness, and migration planning.
• Act as an escalation point for Business Stakeholders, providing guidance on feasibility, complexity, and business value – ensuring that only well‑defined, high‑impact work enters the development lifecycle.
• Accountable for maintaining a continuous improvement mindset by ensuring the work that enters the development pipeline is optimised for delivery performance, which in turn improves team velocity and ensures effective execution within our outsourced development model, while taking ownership of any assigned project‑level coordination responsibilities tied to our transformation efforts.
• Act as a Product Owner in function, owning the evaluation and prioritisation of incoming Rapid requests.
• Serve as the primary escalation point for Business Stakeholders, providing direction on feasibility, scope clarity, and business value.
• Lead Rapid review processes for various business departments, ensuring requests are actionable, properly scoped, and aligned to strategic priorities.
• Make informed decisions on what should and should not enter the development pipeline.
• Evaluate enhancement requests for technical feasibility, platform impact and business value.
• Determine when investigative development (Spikes) are warranted – ensuring they are used selectively and drive meaningful outcomes.
• Challenge unclear, low‑value or redundant requests and guide stakeholders toward higher‑impact solutions.
• Partner with the PMO, business and technical teams to align processes, workflows and system capabilities with the target state models.
• Identify risks, dependencies and gaps in project readiness and ensure those risks are labelled and addressed with the PMO and Business Stakeholders.
• Act as a PMO liaison working across stakeholders to ensure execution momentum and alignment throughout.
• Drive defined consistent improvement effort in the development lifecycle, with a focus on increasing velocity, throughput and delivery predictability.
• Partner with development teams and our development partners to ensure work is ready, prioritised and efficiently executed.
• Identify and eliminate inefficiencies in backlog management, hand‑offs and execution.
• Develop a deep understanding of the end‑to‑end Retail Energy Platform, including cross‑functional dependencies.
• Provide input into system design decisions, data structures and integration considerations to support both current operations and future‑state system design.
• Drive alignment across Business, Technology, QA, Operations and our external development partners.
• Facilitate decision‑making sessions across stakeholders with competing priorities.
• Take ownership of driving initiatives forward, not just defining them.
• Proactively identify risks, gaps and opportunities – and work with our PMO team to ensure we address them.

• Bachelor's degree in Business, IT, Engineering or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 7+ years of experience in Business Analysis, Product Ownership or related roles in a technology‑driven environment
• Experience working in Agile environments (Scrum, Kanban, etc.)
• Experience acting in a Product Owner capacity
• Experience or supporting large‑scale platform transformations
• Background in retail energy, utilities or complex B2B platforms (nice to have but not required)
• Demonstrated success in driving platform improvements and cross‑functional initiatives
• Experience improving delivery performance, reducing cycle time or increasing throughput