Senior Business Analyst — Product Development & Client Enablement
Ascentt · Plano, TX ·
- Seniority
- Senior
- Category
- Business analysis
- Experience
- 8+ years
Ascentt · Plano, TX ·
Senior Business Analyst — Product Development & Client Enablement
Location: Dallas, Texas (on-site)
Experience: 8+ years
About the Role
We are seeking an experienced Senior Business Analyst to play a key role in the continued development and client enablement of an enterprise platform that supports complex business planning and delivery processes.
The Senior Business Analyst will work closely with product leadership, client stakeholders, development teams, and QA teams to ensure that business needs are deeply understood, translated into well-defined product requirements, progressively refined with the delivery team, comprehensively tested, and successfully validated with users.
What You Will Do
• Independently lead working sessions with client stakeholders and subject matter experts, requirements workshops, application walkthroughs, feedback sessions, and capability reviews, probing beyond stated requests to understand the underlying business need, challenge assumptions, and identify gaps and edge cases.
• Translate product direction, design concepts, and client needs into structured functional requirements, user journeys, process flows, business rules, and user stories with clear business context and testable acceptance criteria.
• Maintain traceability from business needs through requirements, stories, testing, and client feedback.
• Collaborate with distributed onsite and offshore development teams to refine the backlog, provide rapid functional clarification during development, and ensure the original business intent is preserved as solutions are designed and built.
• Partner with QA to define business scenarios and expected outcomes, review and challenge test coverage beyond the happy path and perform selective hands-on validation of important workflows.
• Prepare client working teams to evaluate functionality in realistic scenarios and lead UAT and application validation sessions.
• Capture, categorize, and triage client feedback, distinguishing defects, usability improvements, configuration needs, client-specific requirements, and reusable product enhancements, and drive findings to resolution with named owners.
• Provide functional readiness recommendations to product leadership for features and pilots, along with analysis that informs product refinement, positioning, and go-to-market messaging.
• Develop functional expectations and evaluation scenarios for AI-assisted capabilities, considering output quality, consistency, explainability, guardrails, and human-review patterns where AI behavior differs from deterministic functionality.
The Senior Business Analyst works collaboratively across these areas, story readiness is achieved together with the development team, and the role complements rather than replaces the dedicated QA function.
A Note on AI-Enabled Product Analysis
The platform incorporates AI-assisted functionality, and experience with AI-enabled products will be a differentiating capability for this role. The Senior Business Analyst is not expected to be an AI engineer or data scientist, but should be able, or strongly motivated, to understand how AI-enabled functionality differs from traditional deterministic application behavior, and to help define how such capabilities are specified, evaluated, and validated from a business and user perspective.
What We Are Looking For -
Required Qualifications
• 8+ years of experience in Business Analysis, Product Business Analysis, Business Systems Analysis, or a comparable role supporting enterprise technology products or solutions.
• Strong experience analyzing business processes and translating complex business needs into structured functional requirements.
• Ability to rapidly develop functional understanding of complex enterprise business processes without requiring deep prior expertise in a specific business domain.
• Demonstrated experience leading substantive client or stakeholder working sessions, with the ability to engage stakeholders through questioning, analysis, and constructive challenge rather than simply documenting requested functionality.
• Strong experience developing user stories and clear, testable acceptance criteria; hands-on proficiency with Jira in Agile product-development environments.
• Demonstrated experience collaborating with software development teams to refine and groom requirements, and a strong functional understanding of software development and testing lifecycles.
• Experience developing test scenarios, reviewing QA test cases, supporting functional testing, and participating in UAT.
• Ability to identify business-process gaps, edge cases, exceptions, dependencies, risks, and impacts.
• Experience working with distributed teams, including onsite and offshore development and QA teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including workshop facilitation, presentation, and stakeholder management; ability to synthesize complex or unstructured discussions into clear decisions, requirements, and actions.
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline.
Preferred / Differentiating Qualifications
• Experience supporting the development or implementation of enterprise SaaS or configurable software products.
• Experience working simultaneously across product development and client implementation or pilot initiatives.
• Experience with AI-enabled, Generative AI, or intelligent workflow applications, including evaluating AI capabilities from a business and user perspective.
• Domain exposure to enterprise IT delivery: portfolio/project management, IT intake and governance, vendor management, procurement, consulting, or PMO operations.
• Experience with process-modeling, journey-mapping, wireframing, or collaboration tools such as Visio, Lucidchart, Miro, Figma, or similar platforms.
• CBAP, PMI-PBA, or comparable Business Analysis certification is a plus.
Characteristics of the Person We Are Looking For
Engaging, not merely facilitative. Able to enter a client conversation, understand what is being said, ask the next important question, challenge assumptions constructively, and move the discussion toward clarity.
Product-minded. Able to distinguish between what one client requests and what makes sense as a reusable product capability.
Functionally curious. Able to rapidly develop a deep understanding of how the product works and how its capabilities support real business processes.
Collaborative. Comfortable refining requirements together with developers and QA professionals rather than treating requirements as documents handed from one team to another.
Quality-oriented. Naturally, thinks beyond the happy path and asks: What else could happen? What happens if this is missing? What would another persona experience? How do we know this works?
Structured but pragmatic. Creates the right level of documentation and rigor without adding process for its own sake.
Comfortable with ambiguity. Able to take evolving product concepts and incomplete client inputs and progressively turn them into something the team can understand, build, test, and validate.
What Success Looks Like
A successful Senior Business Analyst will create continuity between what stakeholder's need and what users ultimately experience. Client discussions lead to clearer decisions and better-defined needs. User stories enter development with sufficient functional definition and become fully groomed through collaboration with the delivery team. QA teams understand not only what to test, but the business scenarios and risks that matter. Client UAT validates real workflows rather than merely confirming that screens operate. Pilot feedback is systematically translated into defects, configuration changes, product enhancements, or future capabilities.