Company Description
At 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 content—wherever 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 leagues—from the Premier League, NFL, and Formula 1 to the Olympics and IPL—serving customers who rely on accurate, real-time sports information.
Job Description
We 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 execution—able 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 formats—and 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 fundamentals—someone 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.
Responsibilities
Own 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 areas—including 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 model—you 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 team—clicking 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 afternoon, you sync with the lead Product Manager. You report back on where the teams are, flag a dependency between the platform team and the widget team, and discuss whether a migration milestone needs to shift. You translate engineering's "we need two more sprints because of X" into language that makes sense for the roadmap discussion and improvements to avoid a shift in the future.
Between meetings, you're scanning the backlog—re-prioritizing based on what you learned today, writing acceptance criteria for a ticket that was too vague, and archiving stories that are no longer relevant.
Qualifications
3–5+ years of experience in a product management or product owner role, ideally within a data-intensive or platform-oriented environment.
Hands-on experience working embedded within agile engineering teams: managing backlogs, writing user stories, running grooming sessions, and translating product requirements into engineering work.
Strong understanding of data pipelines, databases, and tooling ecosystems—able to speak credibly with engineers about schemas, APIs, and data flows. Some engineering or technical background is a strong plus.
Willingness to challenge the technical status quo—comfortable questioning existing approaches and proposing alternatives, even when that means pushing back on established patterns.
Genuine interest in and knowledge of sports (global and/or US leagues); familiarity with sports data concepts (fixtures, standings, live scores, player statistics) is strongly preferred.
Strong communication skills in both directions: able to articulate product priorities clearly to engineers, and translate technical decisions and trade-offs back to stakeholders and leadership.
Excellent organizational skills with the ability to operate across multiple teams and context-switch effectively without losing quality.
Experience working with distributed, international teams (particularly India-based teams) is a plus.
Comfort with ambiguity and a willingness to roll up sleeves on testing, documentation, and operational support alongside strategic product thinking.
Additional Information
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