Career Area:

Strategy

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other.  We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

The CTCT division (a joint venture between Trimble and Caterpillar) exists to create the industry standard grade control platform, enabling the development of positioning and control products for earthmoving, paving and compaction machines in the construction, mining and landfill industries, using technologies such as GNSS, optical total stations, lasers and sonics.

The Product Owner acts as the internal steward of the product backlog and the delivery team’s value pipeline. In direct partnership with the Product Manager (who owns the market and commercial strategy), the Product Owner is focused internally on user experience, solution validation, team efficiency, and technical health. Their primary responsibility is to ensure the development team is building the right thing and building it right, maximizing the value delivered every single sprint and supporting the goal of Customer Centricity and Cost Effectiveness alongside Radical Simplicity and Quality.

Core Responsibilities Continuous Discovery and Solution Validation

● Problem Deep Dive: Partner with the Product Manager to conduct continuous user discovery, facilitating sessions to unearth root user pain points and quantify the value of potential solutions.

● User-Centric Design: Work closely with UX/Design to validate and refine solutions (through prototypes and mockups) before development, ensuring features are intuitive and designed for the target skill level (new and intermediate operators).

● Requirements planning : Translate high-level themes and epics from the Product Manager into precise, unambiguous User Stories and detailed Acceptance Criteria, serving as the single source of truth for all requirements.

Delivery Management and Team Velocity

● Backlog Ownership: Own the entire product backlog, responsible for managing, prioritizing, and continuously refining work. The goal is to ensure a perpetually "ready" pipeline of 2-3 sprints of defined work.

● Execution Shield: Protect the engineering team's velocity by being the sole point of contact for external queries and acting as the final decision-maker on all in-sprint feature questions. They minimize mid-sprint scope changes to protect delivery commitments.

● System Health: Partner with Engineering leadership (e.g., in areas like supportability and technical architecture) to allocate and manage capacity dedicated to technical debt, infrastructure, and foundational system health, directly supporting the "Max Uptime" gain.

Cross-Functional Alignment and Quality Assurance

● Interoperability Synchronization: Proactively identify and resolve all cross-team and cross-product dependencies, securing commitments from other groups (Core, PCC, INS, V&V) in advance of development start and support Program and Project leads who are managing the coordination of delivery and dependencies.

● Quality Assurance: Define the "Definition of Done" and formally approve completed features against the acceptance criteria, ensuring the delivered product is high-quality, bug-free, and meets the original user-centric intent.

● Supportability Focus: Integrate supportability requirements into the backlog to ensure products are easy to upgrade, maintain, and troubleshoot, directly addressing the pain point of products being hard to upgrade easily and efficiently.

Key Performance Outcomes (KPOs) and Expectations

The success of the Product Owner is measured by the predictability, efficiency, and quality of the delivery pipeline.

Backlog Readiness & Flow- Velocity Predictability & Blockers: Consistently maintain 2 sprints of "ready" work in the backlog. Blockers attributable to unclear requirements must be near-zero.Solves Excessive WIP and ensures R&D capacity is well utilized.

Feature Quality & Integrity: Features released to production must have minimal P0/P1 defects attributable to requirements gaps. Focus on eliminating the cause of unproductive work/rework.Delivers on the customer gain of a Reliable, predictive, precise system.

Delivery Efficiency: Successfully minimize mid-sprint scope changes and unplanned work, keeping development team interruption below 10% of sprint capacity. Directly addresses the problem of poor workload visibility and task-switching.

Solution Validation Rate - Discovery to Development Ratio: 90% of features entering development must have documented validation (user interview, prototype feedback) demonstrating value and usability.

Dependency Management: All external dependencies are identified, secured, and communicated with Program/ Project at least one month ahead of the consuming team's development start. Solves Broken Channels & Information Silos and supports the Interoperability goals.

Why Join Us?

Join a team where "Radical Simplicity" and "Customer Centricity" aren't just buzzwords—they are the standard. At CTCT, you will have the autonomy to drive real impact on the machines that build our world.

This position requires working onsite five days a week.

 

Visa Sponsorship is not available for this position.

Posting Dates:

April 8, 2026 - April 23, 2026

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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