Appian Forward Deployed Product Owner
Wilmington Trust · Remote · $148,300–$247,100 (stated in the posting)
Overview:
The Wilmington Trust Institutional Services (IS) division is experiencing rapid business growth and has initiated a strategic digital transformation program. The goals of the program are to grow revenue through new and transformed digital-first trust and agency service products, to move from a product-centric to client-centric operating model, to move from market-specific to global solutions, and to dramatically lower the cost to serve.
Wilmington Trust is seeking an Appian Forward Deployed Product Owner to help accelerate digital transformation across our core operations. This role is designed for an experienced product, business analysis, or transformation professional who can operate close to business users, translate operational needs into deployable digital workflows, and help lead iterative delivery in a regulated financial services environment.
This role is a hybrid between a product owner, business analyst, low-code workflow designer, and AI-enabled process lead, with a strong focus on designing and configuring end-to-end workflows directly in Appian Designer.
The role requires hands-on Appian experience, strong business process and analytical skills, and the ability to partner across business, operations, technology, risk, and product stakeholders to move quickly from discovery to working solutions. While working closely with individual business teams, the role will maintain a platform-first mindset by leveraging shared capabilities, reusable components, and consistent design patterns rather than creating isolated or duplicative solutions.
Ideal candidates will be comfortable owning product outcomes, facilitating working sessions, writing stories and specifications, validating build quality, and using AI-assisted tools to accelerate analysis, documentation, prototyping, testing, and workflow improvement. The successful candidate will be able to work forward-deployed with business teams while maintaining strong product discipline, governance, and delivery rigor.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Design, configure, and improve business process workflows using Appian Designer, with a focus on speed to value, user-centric design, reuse of shared platform capabilities and patterns, governance, and operational control.
- Partner closely with business product owners, operations leaders, technology teams, and risk partners to gather requirements, map processes, define user needs, and prioritize workflow improvements.
- Own and manage product backlog items, including authoring, refining, and grooming user stories, acceptance criteria, specifications, process flows, UI concepts, test scenarios, and release-ready requirements.
- Lead stakeholder working sessions to define current-state and future-state workflows, identify friction points, iterate on MVP designs, resolve issues, and drive alignment across business and technology teams.
- Evaluate business requirements to identify opportunities for reuse across workflows and business areas, and partner with platform and technology teams to determine when an existing capability should be reused or extended before creating a new solution.
- Use AI-assisted and agentic AI tools to accelerate discovery, process analysis, requirements documentation, story drafting, workflow prototyping, test case generation, defect analysis, and delivery communications.
- Focus on outcomes over outputs, incorporating design thinking, analytics, business process engineering, and user feedback to inform product decisions and continuous improvement.
- Support QA, UAT, regression testing, and production validation by defining test scenarios, validating builds, documenting defects, gathering issue resolution requirements, and confirming readiness for release.
- Partner with technology teams on integration points, data dependencies, security considerations, platform constraints, and production support needs.
- Keep current with Appian capabilities, including Appian AI, Case Management Studio, RPA, data fabric, reporting, and platform governance, and recommend opportunities to apply new capabilities responsibly.
- Champion a platform-first approach and Appian best practices around governance, reusability, modular design, shared patterns, versioning, packaging, maintainability, and controlled delivery in a regulated environment.
- Participate in agile ceremonies, including daily standups, planning sessions, backlog refinement, demos, and retrospectives.
- Build and maintain Appian reports and dashboards to track workflow performance, user activity, operational quality, and business metrics; partner with senior stakeholders to define meaningful KPIs.
- Understand and adhere to the Company’s risk and regulatory standards, policies and controls in accordance with the Company’s Risk Appetite. Identify risk-related issues needing escalation to management.
- Promote an environment that supports belonging and reflects the M&T Bank brand.
- Maintain M&T internal control standards, including timely implementation of internal and external audit points together with any issues raised by external regulators as applicable.
- Complete other related duties as assigned.
Education and Experience Required:
- Bachelor’s degree and a minimum of 10 years’ business, analytical, technical, digital product, transformation, or product ownership experience, or in lieu of a degree, a combined minimum of 14 years’ higher education and/or relevant work experience, including a minimum of 10 years’ business, analytical, technical, digital product, transformation, or product ownership experience.
- Hands-on experience with Appian, including experience building, configuring, testing, or supporting workflows, forms, interfaces, records, process models, reports, dashboards, or related Appian objects.
- Experience in financial services and/or fintech, including exposure to regulated business processes, operational risk, client service, banking, wealth management, trust services, payments, capital markets, lending, compliance, or similar domains.
- Experience operating as a product owner, product analyst, business analyst, transformation lead, or workflow designer in an agile or iterative delivery environment.
- Experience writing detailed, actionable user stories, acceptance criteria, specifications, process flows, business rules, UI concepts, testing scenarios, or release documentation.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to structure ambiguous problems, assess operational impacts, analyze data or process evidence, and recommend practical solutions.
- Exposure to QA, UAT, regression testing, defect triage, test case development, production validation, or other solution quality practices.
- Working knowledge of AI-assisted tools or agentic AI concepts and the ability to use AI responsibly to improve analysis, documentation, testing, prototyping, or workflow delivery.
- Ability to bridge business and technical teams, translating needs into executable solutions and explaining technical constraints, risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs to stakeholders.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to facilitate working sessions, present recommendations, document decisions, and drive alignment across teams.
- Ability to manage competing priorities, work independently, and deliver in a fast-paced, regulated transformation environment.
Education and Experience Preferred:
- Appian Level 1 or higher certification, or equivalent hands-on experience with Appian Designer.
- Familiarity with SAIL expressions for configuring dynamic forms, validations, conditional logic, and reusable interface patterns.
- Understanding of Appian object reusability, versioning, packaging, release management, performance considerations, and platform governance best practices.
- Experience with Appian AI, Case Management Studio, Appian RPA, data fabric, connected systems, integrations, or document management workflows.
- Experience delivering business-specific workflows on a shared platform and identifying opportunities to reuse or extend common capabilities across multiple use cases.
- Experience using agentic AI or AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Open Claw, Hermes, or similar tools to support product analysis, prototyping, testing, documentation, or automation.
- Experience with low-code or no-code workflow platforms beyond Appian, such as Power Platform, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Pega, Airtable, Retool, Mendix, or similar tools.
- Strong understanding of business process mapping, process engineering, service design, user journey design, and operational improvement methods.
- Experience developing, managing, or launching digital capabilities in financial services, fintech, trust services, institutional services, compliance, legal operations, or document-intensive environments.
- Experience working in partnership with user experience, design, data, architecture, cybersecurity, risk, legal, compliance, or operations teams.
- Knowledge of Agile, Lean, design thinking, systems thinking, and continuous improvement principles and practices.