Senior Product Manager I ( Product Owner- Sports products)

Company DescriptionAt Nielsen, we are passionate about powering a better media future for all people by providing powerful, essential insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with contentwherever and whenever it's consumed.Gracenote, a Nielsen Company, is the world's leading provider of entertainment metadata and content IDs. We sit at the intersection of media, technology, and data, helping the world's largest entertainment brands connect people to the content they love.Gracenote Sports is a global operation that collects, manages, and delivers live results and comprehensive sports data across all major global and local leaguesfrom the Premier League, NFL, and Formula 1 to the Olympics and IPLserving customers who rely on accurate, real-time sports information.Job DescriptionWe are seeking a hands-on product owner to support the Gracenote Sports product team in building, consolidating, and delivering our sports data and product ecosystem. In this role, you will work closely with the lead Product Manager to ensure development teams have well-defined backlogs, clear priorities, and a deep understanding of the "what" and "why" behind their work. Critically, you will also serve as the bridge between product strategy and engineering executionable to understand and communicate the "how" in both directions.Gracenote Sports is at a pivotal point: unifying legacy platforms into a single, consolidated database and tooling ecosystem, while simultaneously designing a data model capable of representing the full diversity of global sports and competition formatsand delivering that data through customer-facing products (Global Sports Data API, Global Sports Widgets). This role will be instrumental in accelerating that transformation by embedding product ownership directly within engineering teams and ensuring day-to-day delivery stays aligned with the broader sports product roadmap.The ideal candidate combines a genuine passion for sports with strong product ownership fundamentalssomeone who thrives in the detail of backlog management, ticket creation, grooming, and testing while maintaining sight of the bigger picture across platform, data pipelines, and frontend delivery products.ResponsibilitiesOwn and manage backlogs for one or more engineering squads: translate PRDs and roadmap priorities into well-structured engineering tickets with clear acceptance criteria, and keep backlogs prioritized and ready for development.Conduct grooming and sprint planning sessions with engineering teams; ensure teams understand what they are building, why it matters, and how it fits the broader roadmap.Serve as a two-way translator between product and engineering: communicate product intent to developers, and explain technical approach and trade-offs back to stakeholders.Perform hands-on testing and validation of tooling, data pipeline, and product changes, ensuring quality and correctness before release.Work flexibly across multiple teams and product areasincluding the data collection tooling team (Mumbai), the data platform team, the data processing team, and the frontend delivery products (Global Sports Data API, Global Sports Widgets)providing product ownership where it is most needed.Challenge existing technical approaches and legacy patterns. Bring alternative perspectives to engineering discussions and push teams to consider better, more scalable solutions rather than defaulting to the status quo.Develop a solid understanding of the full sports product portfolio, the various sports and competition formats being modeled, and the data flows from collection through to customer-facing product delivery.Support migration and consolidation efforts by helping define requirements for data migration, tool unification, database integration, and data model design that accommodates diverse sports and competition formats.A Day in the Life Your morning starts with a standup for one of the platform teams. A developer has questions about how a new competition format (say, a multi-stage cycling race) should be represented in the data modelyou pull up the PRD, walk through the expected behavior, and sketch out the edge cases together.Mid-morning, you're grooming tickets for the next sprint with a different squad working on the Global Sports Data API. You challenge a proposed approach that mirrors a legacy pattern: "Why are we doing it this way Could we handle this more generically so it works for athletics too " The engineer pushes back, you discuss trade-offs, and together you land on a better solution.After lunch, you're testing a tooling release with the Mumbai teamclicking through the data entry workflows, verifying that the new football league they onboarded last week flows correctly from collection tool to database to API output. You find an edge case, log a bug with clear reproduction steps, and flag it before it ships.Late