Technical Product Owner, HRS SF424
Huron Consulting · Remote · Chicago, United States · 1mo ago
Huron helps its clients drive growth, enhance performance and sustain leadership in the markets they serve. We collaborate with education organizations to develop strategies and implement solutions that enable the transformative change our clients need to own their future. Together, we empower clients to drive innovation, create sustainable funding streams and deliver better student outcomes.
Today, leaders of higher education institutions and academic medical centers are spending too much time reacting to market forces, rather than focusing on the essential priorities that help students, faculty and staff thrive. The most productive path forward requires an intentional approach and innovative thinking, whereby stakeholders across the entire institution rally around a shared vision and embrace the hard work of effecting change.
You’ll help our clients to achieve organizational effectiveness, improve student outcomes, implement new technologies and align resources and investments to ensure long-term sustainability.
Join our team as the expert you are now and create your future.
The role requires a strong analytical orientation and the ability to learn a complex intersection of federal grants administration, Grants.gov system-to-system submission requirements, HRS Grants workflows, form engines, field mappings, XML schemas, validation rules, attachment handling, and agency-specific form behavior. The ideal candidate is comfortable working close to technical detail without needing to be a software engineer.
This Technical Product Owner will work in close partnership with the HRS SF424 Product Owner and HRS Product Management. The role supports requirements of clarity, validation throughput, engineering readiness, and product continuity while Product Management and the Product Owner retain final roadmap, prioritization, and product decision authority.
SF424 Forms, Grants.gov & Research Administration Domain Support
Expectation: Build enough SF424, Grants.gov, and research administration knowledge to support accurate product analysis and informed decision-making.
• Develop strong working knowledge of SF-424, SF-424 R&R, mandatory, individual, short organization, budget, subaward, and agency-specific form families used in federal grant application packages.
• Understand how HRS Grants supports proposal development, institutional routing and approvals, sponsor opportunity packages, Grants.gov submissions, attachments, budgets, subawards, certifications, and related research administration workflows.
• Analyze federal form instructions, business rules, form versions, schema changes, agency-specific requirements, and customer workflow expectations to determine product and implementation impact.
• Support the Product Owner and subject matter experts by preparing structured analysis, surfacing decision points, documenting rationale, and reducing dependency on a single product lead for detailed operational product support.
• Pay particular attention to complex budget-related forms and subaward forms, where calculations, repeats, attachments, cross-form dependencies, and HRS implementation logic may require deeper manual analysis and validation.
Requirements, Mapping, Validation & Engineering Readiness
Expectation: Turn SF424 source materials, mappings, and technical inputs into clear, validated requirements that engineering and QA can act on.
• Create and validate SF424 requirements workbooks from Grants.gov instructions, schemas, HRS Grants logic, field-level rules, and product priorities.
• Analyze key form details, including field definitions, versions, display and required rules, validation rules, list values, help text, repeatable sections, attachments, and budget logic.
• Review generated workbooks, scorecards, mappings, and inferencing outputs to identify gaps, incorrect assumptions, rule issues, and missing requirements.
• Translate ambiguous input into clear requirements, assumptions, open questions, decisions, and follow-up actions.
• Validate mappings between Grants.gov fields, XML/XSD schemas, HRS Grants data, configuration, source-system behavior, and expected form output.
• Partner with engineering, architecture, and QA to interpret requirements in the context of forms, schemas, integrations, data models, rules, attachments, and submission workflows.
• Prepare clean engineering handoff materials with validated requirements, assumptions, risks, test considerations, implementation notes, and unresolved questions.
• Support QA and post-build validation for form generation, validation, attachments, submission scenarios, regression coverage, UAT, defect triage, and acceptance.
• Balance business needs, technical constraints, data availability, Grants.gov compliance, implementation complexity, and release risk when recommending next steps.
Prototyping & Future-State SF424 Experience
Expectation: Use prototyping, AI-assisted discovery, and technical analysis to help redefine how SF424 supports a lower-friction path from funding discovery through integration, submission, and award.
• Explore future-state SF424 workflows that reduce friction across funding opportunity search, proposal preparation, form population, validation, submission, status tracking, and award transition.
• Use AI-assisted analysis to identify new ways to integrate with Grants.gov, agency systems, sponsor data sources, funding opportunity feeds, research administration systems, and related pre-award or post-award workflows.
• Create lightweight prototypes, workflow concepts, data-flow sketches, prompts, test cases, proof-of-concept artifacts, or structured experiments that help the product team evaluate new SF424 integration and automation approaches.
• Assess how emerging capabilities could improve opportunity discovery, data reuse, institutional approvals, sponsor-specific requirements, attachment preparation, validation confidence, submission readiness, award setup, and downstream handoffs.
• Translate prototype findings into practical recommendations, risks, assumptions, product options, and candidate backlog items that Product Management, the Product Owner, Engineering, and Services can evaluate for roadmap consideration.
Collaboration with Product Team
Expectation: Work closely with Product Management, the Product Owner, Engineering, QA, and Services to align decisions, dependencies, and delivery execution.
• Partner closely with Grants Product Management, the HRS SF424 Product Owner, engineering, QA, and Services to clarify requirements, align delivery expectations, and support product execution across SF424 forms and form waves.
• Coordinate with the Product Owner and Product Management to document decisions, dependencies, blockers, open questions, validation status, ownership, due dates, and follow-up actions.
• Work with other Product Owners and Product Managers to keep the system of record in Azure DevOps well-groomed, prioritized, current, and aligned with Huron’s SDLC process.
• Work with engineering and QA to ensure requirements, mappings, validation notes, test considerations, and handoff materials are clear, complete, and actionable.
• Collaborate with Services to understand implementation considerations, customer-facing impacts, UAT needs, and practical delivery constraints that may affect SF424 readiness or rollout.
• Communicate complex functional and technical findings clearly within the product team, including concise summaries, options, recommendations, risks, and escalation points.
Documentation, Knowledge Transfer & Process Improvement
Expectation: Create durable documentation, repeatable processes, and knowledge-transfer materials that improve continuity and execution quality.
• Document SF424 repository structure, form analysis approach, workbook creation steps, validation expectations, handoff process, generated artifact usage, known issues, and repeatable review patterns.
• Create and maintain templates, checklists, review guides, traceability notes, and process documentation that improve consistency and reduce reliance on informal knowledge transfer.
• Identify opportunities to improve requirements quality, validation throughput, generated output accuracy, tracker hygiene, handoff readiness, and engineering feedback loops.
• Use tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Microsoft Excel, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and internal product tools where appropriate to support analysis and collaboration.
• Serve as a dependable backup resource for product-related questions, requirements context, validation history, and release support when the Product Owner or primary subject matter expert is unavailable.
Required Qualifications
Domain & Industry Expertise
• U.S. work authorization is required.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience in business administration, research administration, public administration, science, computer science, management information systems, industrial engineering, mathematics, or another analytical, business, scientific, or technology-related field.
• At least 2 years of experience as a Technical Product Owner, Product Analyst, Product Owner, Implementation Consultant, Quality Analyst, or similar role supporting complex software products or cross-functional software delivery teams.
• Experience working in research administration, grants management, federal grant applications, government or compliance-driven programs, higher education, healthcare, academic medicine, or another complex regulated domain.
• Ability to develop a strong working understanding of SF-424 forms, federal grant application packages, proposal development workflows, budgets, subawards, attachments, and Grants.gov system-to-system submissions.
Business Analysis & Requirements Management
• Strong ability to document clear requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, validation notes, decision logs, open questions, assumptions, and stakeholder-facing summaries.
• Ability to translate messy, incomplete, ambiguous, or highly technical input into structured analysis, actionable next steps, and engineering-ready requirements.
• Experience supporting backlog refinement, bug triage, requirements validation, release readiness, UAT support, implementation support, or similar delivery activities.
• Ability to compare source materials, generated outputs, system behavior, stakeholder feedback, and test results to identify discrepancies, gaps, risks, and required corrections.
• High attention to detail, balanced with the judgment to keep work moving forward, escalate appropriately, and distinguish must-fix issues from items that can be deferred or documented.
Technical Fluency
• Working understanding of enterprise software, SaaS products, forms engines, rules engines, data mappings, integrations, APIs, XML or JSON, schemas, data flows, configuration, attachments, error handling, and release validation.
• Ability to read and discuss technical artifacts such as field mapping files, schema definitions, architectural diagrams, repository structures, generated outputs, test results, and non-functional considerations at a business analyst level.
• Comfort working in tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub or source repositories, Microsoft Excel, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and internal product or support tools.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts, tradeoffs, risks, and questions clearly to non-technical stakeholders and functional requirements clearly to engineering and QA teams.
• Comfort using AI-assisted productivity or analysis tools, such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot, while validating outputs carefully against source materials, requirements, and subject matter expert guidance.
Collaboration & Communication
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to create polished documentation and communicate clearly with product, engineering, QA, support, implementation, customer-facing, and leadership stakeholders.
• Strong facilitation, analytical thinking, problem-solving, and follow-through skills across both technical and non-technical topics.
• Demonstrated empathy for users and passion for delivering high-quality software that supports grants management and federal research funding processes.
• Ability to work independently, manage competing priorities, adapt quickly, and bring structure to ambiguous or fast-moving work.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across multiple time zones and with distributed teams, including teams in the U.S. and India.
Preferred Qualifications
• 3+ years of experience as a Technical Product Owner, Product Analyst, Product Owner, Implementation Consultant, Quality Analyst, or similar enterprise software role.
• Experience with Huron Research Suite, Huron Click, InfoEd, Cayuse, Kuali, COEUS, or similar research administration or grants management solutions.
• Direct experience with SF-424, SF-424 R&R, Grants.gov Workspace, Grants.gov system-to-system submissions, federal form packages, or federal form instructions and schemas.
• Familiarity with Grants.gov applicant web services or APIs, XML/XSD schemas, WSDLs, application zip files, submission status, certificate-based authentication, mTLS, hashing, attachment handling, and related integration concepts.
• Experience supporting proposal development, sponsored projects, award setup, budgets, subawards, attachments, compliance forms, institutional approvals, or related research administration processes.
• Experience creating or validating requirements workbooks, traceability matrices, field mapping documents, display or require rules, validation rules catalogs, scorecards, test cases, or release readiness artifacts.
• Experience using Azure DevOps for features, user stories, bugs, tasks, queries, and delivery tracking.
• Experience using GitHub, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or similar tools to support analysis, documentation, generated output validation, or process improvement.
• Experience supporting QA, UAT, release validation, customer implementation activities, or production issue triage for complex enterprise software.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio or Lucid, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and related collaboration or product execution tools.
Success Metrics
• SF424 requirements workbooks are more complete, accurate, consistent, and ready for engineering with fewer unresolved questions and fewer avoidable rework cycles.
• The Product Owner and subject matter experts experience reduced operational burden because the Business Analyst can prepare analysis, validate outputs, track questions, and coordinate follow-up independently.
• Forms move more predictably through the validation workflow from workbook creation to requirements validation, post-review, engineering readiness, implementation validation, and completion.
• Generated mapping, workbook, inferencing, and scorecard outputs improve over time because errors, rule gaps, and recurring patterns are documented and fed back into the process.
• Engineering teams receive clearer handoff packages, better requirements context, more complete validation notes, and more actionable test considerations.
• Budget, subaward, attachment, validation, and cross-form dependency issues are identified earlier, documented clearly, and escalated with enough context for decision-making.
• Status trackers and stakeholder updates accurately reflect current progress, ownership, blockers, due dates, and readiness across SF424 forms and waves.
• Delivered SF424 capabilities align with Grants.gov form specifications, schema requirements, system-to-system submission expectations, HRS Grants workflows, and customer needs.
• Documentation and knowledge transfer improve continuity for the SF424 product area and reduce reliance on informal knowledge held by a single consultant, product lead, or subject matter expert.
The estimated base salary for this job is $95,000- $130,000. The actual salary paid to an individual will vary based on multiple factors, including but not limited to specific skills or certifications, years of experience, market changes, and required travel. This job is also eligible to participate in Huron’s annual incentive compensation program, which reflects Huron’s pay for performance philosophy. Inclusive of annual incentive compensation opportunity, the total estimated compensation range for this job is $109,250 - $149,500. The job is also eligible to participate in Huron’s benefit plans which include medical, dental and vision coverage and other wellness programs.