Technology Release Lead

About this role:

Wells Fargo is seeking a Release Leader, who will be responsible for guiding team(s) of Delivery / Release Leads, Scrum Masters, project managers and other support roles to navigate and coordinate all cross-product production releases, while also partnering with product development teams as they adopt, grow, and sustain more efficient ways of working leveraging agile and product practices.

The Release Lead has three main responsibilities; (1) ensures delivery is orchestrated across teams and dependent products (2) continuous improvement across the Product Line and Product and (3) technical release activities related to SDLC, ECM and CI/CD.

They partner with product teams to ensure appropriate planning for software release across the product (and/or multiple products) while creating a culture of continuous learning, skill growth, and adoption of new ways of working. This includes guiding team to meeting business objectives and execute against product strategies while partnering to work through dependencies, impediments, and risks up, down and across the product line regarding changes that may introduce risk into the system.  This role will be expected to help to create trusted relationships across all levels so that the release team, scrum masters, product owners and development teams can successfully coordinate across dependencies and implement new code effectively together, evolving collaborative release planning into a sustainable state.

In this role, you will:

• Provide thought leadership to maintain customer centricity and facilitates activities that foster continuous improvement
• Strategically engage with all levels of professionals, program or product managers and stakeholders to enhance transparency, resolve issues, and foster team empowerment; serves as an advisor to leadership and a peer mentor on technical change management policies,
• Plan and facilitate cross-product / internal product quarterly planning sessions to promote understanding of prioritized needs, estimate which deliverables must be achieved in the same cycle and potential impacts to live code across the technology eco-system.
• Support the product line management team and product team in connecting the activities needed to bring the working software into production, by holding collaborative and inclusive conversations and release mapping.
• Ensure transparency and clarity across the product on the synchronization of release events, including but not limited to the iterative development of feature roadmap(s), to help the team recognize potential dependencies and conflicts.
• Partners with product manager and technology groups to mitigate risk by holding a view of the full technology eco-system (e.g., infrastructure and 3rd party dependencies, financial implications of delays, hazards of implementations occurring ‘off-schedule’, impacts of production errors, etc.,)
• Coach and support scrum masters and product release roles to grow maturity in role, while managing dependencies across multiple product feature teams and improving team cohesion to promote collaboration.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to foster a strong relationship between engineering managers, product managers, product owners, and scrum masters.
• Communicate frequently with stakeholders, escalate impediments, help manage risk, and drive relentless improvement.
• Serve as a coach to those across and upward, ensuring clarity in the behaviors and practices required to successfully implement the product operating model.
• Partnering with the product manager to support product (L3) delivery with an Agile, product, and modern-engineering mindset. They champion these mindsets to enable product areas to deliver customer-centric products.
• Understanding a release’s leading and lagging indicators to partner with the team and provide active thought leadership focused on continuous improvement.
• Assists all delivery / release roles (where applicable) in understanding and adhering to all Enterprise requirements required for software implementation.
• Assists in ensuring compliance, SDLC and ECM/change management efforts are understood and adopted across the Product.
• Ability to gather and analyze data that substantiates change activity, trends and risks.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of Business Systems Data and Business Systems Designing experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
• 6+ years Agile experience in role of scrum master and/or product owner
• 3+ years of Release planning, management and mapping experience
• Excellent Communication skills with multiple levels of leadership
• Stakeholder Relationship Management

Required Qualifications for Europe, Middle East & Africa only:

• Experience in Business Systems Data and Business Systems Designing, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education

Desired Qualifications:

• Scaled Agile experience with leading Product Increment Planning
• Tool experience in Jira, Confluence and Service Now
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) experience
• Familiar with the role of Legal business within financial industry, tools and products
• Risk Management skills
• Vendor Management relationship skills

Job Expectations:

• The Release Lead position is responsible for the release management lifecycle, including scheduling, planning coordinating, facilitating and overall management of releases for multiple applications across various product areas for the business teams.
• Responsible for managing and enforcing release best practices, process and procedures for code movement through UAT and Production environments
• Collaborate closely with cross functional teams such as product management, software development, engineering to ensure releases are supported for on time and high level of quality
• Plan and facilitate cross-product / internal product quarterly planning sessions to promote understanding of prioritized needs, estimate which deliverables must be achieved in the same cycle and potential impacts to live code across the technology eco-system.
• Support the product line management team and product team in connecting the activities needed to bring the working software into production, by holding collaborative and inclusive conversations and release mapping.
• Ensure transparency and clarity across the product on the synchronization of release events, including but not limited to the iterative development of feature roadmap(s), to help the team recognize potential dependencies and conflicts.
• Partners with product manager and technology groups to mitigate risk by holding a view of the full technology eco-system (e.g., infrastructure and 3rd party dependencies, financial implications of delays, hazards of implementations occurring ‘off-schedule’, impacts of production errors, etc.,)

Posting End Date: 

*Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.

Applicants with Disabilities

To request a medical accommodation during the application or interview process, visit Disability Inclusion at Wells Fargo.

Drug and Alcohol Policy

Wells Fargo maintains a drug free workplace.  Please see our Drug and Alcohol Policy to learn more.

Wells Fargo Recruitment and Hiring Requirements:

a. Third-Party recordings are prohibited unless authorized by Wells Fargo.

b. Wells Fargo requires you to directly represent your own experiences during the recruiting and hiring process.