Position Summary:
Cadwell is seeking a Product Owner – Sierra Product Line to serve as the vital link between our clinical vision and engineering execution. This role is designed for a professional with a technical foundation who has gained hands-on experience in the Sierra clinical environment and now wishes to drive product development from the "inside."
As the Technical Translator for the Sierra product line, you will spend approximately 70% of your time working directly with the engineering team to manage the product backlog, lead technical refinement, and ensure that every feature, whether hardware or software, is clinically usable and technically sound. The Product Owner works in close partnership with a Product Manager who owns overall product strategy, market positioning, and lifecycle decisions. The Product Owner ensures that strategy of the Product Manager is translated into technically sound and executable development plans.
This is a technical leadership role: the Product Owner sets technical direction and drives cross-functional decisions across Engineering, Support, and partners.
Key Duties / Responsibilities:
- Backlog Ownership & Prioritization: Manage and refine the Sierra product backlog to align with PM roadmap and business priorities, ensuring the team is always working on the most impactful features and maintenance tasks to resolve competing priorities.
- Features Definition: Translate clinical workflows and user needs into clear product features. Define "Definition of Done" and acceptance criteria to ensure engineering efforts align with user expectations.
- Technical Refinement & Collaboration: Participate in technical refinement sessions to provide clinical context and clarify functional goals, helping the engineering team assess technical feasibility, architectural impact and requirements development.
- Agile Ceremony Ownership: Own and facilitate the team's Agile ceremonies (program increments, sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews and demos, and retrospectives) and hold the team accountable to the agreed development process.
- Release & Launch Process Ownership: Own the product's progression through Cadwell's release, versioning, and change-control processes, ensuring release-checklist, patch-communication, and validation steps are completed so the correct, verified product reaches the field. Support Engineering through the release and product-launch process.
- Technical Guidance & Direction: Provide technical and architectural direction to the development team, including participation in design and code reviews, to support sound engineering decisions and maintain product quality.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Lead functional validation and user acceptance testing to ensure they meet market needs and satisfy the defined acceptance criteria.
- Clinical Validation: Plan and coordinate clinical validation of new features and algorithms with clinical and KOL partners (e.g., Mayo Clinic), analyzing results to confirm clinical performance and support intended-use claims, in coordination with Regulatory/QARA.
- Hardware/Software/Consumables Ecosystem Alignment: Ensure that software requirements account for the full product ecosystem, including software licensing, consumables, accessories, amplifiers and headboxes, to maintain seamless signal acquisition and a cohesive user experience.
- Escalated Support Partnership: Provide expert clinical and functional guidance to the service and support teams to help diagnose complex escalated customer issues and identify potential product enhancements. In coordination with the product specialists who focus on escalations, act as a connection point between Support and Engineering to help ensure issues are correctly routed and scoped.
- Development Partner Support: Support Cadwell's clinical development and key-opinion-leader (KOL) partners, such as Mayo Clinic, in coordination with Product Management, translating partner input into engineering-ready requirements and supporting joint deliverables.
- Documentation: Create and maintain user-facing documentation, release notes, training materials, and functional requirements to support product transparency and training.
- Other Duties: Perform other duties as requested, directed, or assigned.
Job Knowledge / Requirements:
- Technical Translation: Ability to decompose complex clinical workflows into logical, granular requirements and clear specifications for engineering teams.
- Systems Thinking: Ability to understand technical specifications, system architecture, and signal processing basics to effectively communicate with engineering.
- Detail-Oriented Communication: Exceptional English written and oral communication skills; specifically, the ability to document "Definitions of Done" and technical specifications that are testable, concise, and unambiguous.
- Problem Diagnosis: Ability to provide strategic technical insight for escalated customer issues, distinguishing between software bugs, hardware failures, and clinical misconfigurations.
- Strong Prioritization Skills: Ability to make difficult trade-off decisions and manage a product backlog to maximize value in each development sprint.
- Collaboration: Ability to complete work both independently and as an effective member of a team; adapt to changing requirements and priorities.
- Technical Leadership & Influence: Lead cross-functional execution and build alignment across Engineering, Support, and development partners through influence and credibility; set technical direction, own the development process, and hold the team accountable to quality and release commitments.
Education / Experience:
- Education: Bachelor's degree (BS) in Engineering (Biomedical, Electrical, or Computer Engineering) or Computer Science is strongly preferred; Other Bachelor's degrees with field equivalent professional technical experience will be considered.
- Experience Requirements:
- Technical & Product Background: 5+ years of experience in software product development, technical systems analysis, or engineering. Candidates must demonstrate a clear ability to decompose complex system logic into granular, testable specifications.
- Clinical Domain Experience (Priority): Hands-on clinical experience with Cadwell neurodiagnostic systems (EMG/NCS/EP/NMUS) or comparable equipment is weighted heavily for this role and may offset less formal Agile or Product Owner tenure. Deep familiarity with the clinical workflows the software supports is valued more highly than years of generic product-owner experience.
- Preferred Qualifications:
- Clinical Exposure: Experience with clinical Sierra (EMG/NCS/EP/NMUS) workflows or neurodiagnostic equipment; alternatively, a demonstrated aptitude for learning complex clinical workflows to bridge user needs with technical feasibility.
- Hospital Network Systems: Working knowledge of hospital network architecture and access controls, healthcare interoperability standards (HL7, DICOM), and virtualized desktop environments (Citrix Workspace).
- Industry Knowledge: Experience in a medical device or similarly regulated environment, specifically with hardware/software integration such as signal acquisition, amplifiers, or sensors.
- Agile Proficiency: Previous experience in a Product Owner or Business Analyst role using Agile/Scrum methodologies and project management tools like Azure DevOps or Jira.
Physical Requirements / Working Conditions:
- Physical Demands: Positions working with Cadwell equipment may require reaching, bending, stooping, and lifting/carrying up to 50 pounds; finger dexterity for repetitive motions; and visual acuity including color vision.
- Location: Based out of headquarters in Kennewick, WA.
- Travel: Travel to various commercial events and key customer sites is required (approximately 10%)
- Compliance: Role supported by a dedicated Quality and Regulatory (QARA) team; however, the PO must ensure products adhere to clinical data integrity and medical device standards (FDA, HIPAA, etc.).
- Credentialing: May be required to register with a vendor credentialing service and complete a US federal background check for access to government facilities.
Cadwell Industries, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and as such affirms the right of every person to participate in all aspects of employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic. If you are interested in applying for employment and need special assistance or an accommodation to apply for a posted position, contact our Human Resources Department at [email protected].
