Job Description

The Product Owner (PO) is a member of the Agile Team responsible for defining Stories and prioritising the Team Backlog to streamline the execution of business priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the Features or components for the team. The PO works with stakeholders to identify and organise the steps required for the next iteration. The PO will then meet with their team to refine the process, identify areas for improvement, and support the sprint. The PO makes sure all parties are informed about what is going on, when its going to happen, and how its going to impact them.Key ResponsibilitiesCollaboration with business stakeholders

• Collaborates with all business stakeholders to arrive at the vision, goals, priorities and business objectives
• Spends time in business units to ensure understanding and alignment of business needs and direction
• Crafts the definition of Ready and Done with the team
• Builds trust with business to make decisions around the product
• Works with business stakeholders at their need for level of detail and involvement
• Facilitates collaboration between the right stakeholders to ensure sound decision making

Defining the Product Vision, Goals, and Measurement (collaborative process)

• Brings together and takes ownership of the product vision and communicate this to the team
• Maps out customer journeys, business processes and their associated performance metrics
• Determines Business objectives
• Identify product domain boundaries and grow relevant product domain knowledge
• Ensure product build is in line with systems architecture
• Negotiates and takes ownership of product goals
• Measures the inherent and commercial value created by the product over time, especially after deployments
• Ensures alignment between all business stakeholders and IT in vision and goals

Managing the Product Backlog

• Calculates/understands the value and risk of items and manages this accordingly
• Prioritises the product backlog in order of value, risk or business importance in collaboration / consultation with business owners / stakeholders and the development team
• Ensures the backlog is visible to all stakeholders
• Actively involved in product backlog refinement (With entire team and at times business)
• Actively creates clarity to the level required (based on context of the team) and leverages the team to create clarity too
• Guides and ensures clarity at least 2 sprints ahead of time for the sprints
• Balances the conflicting needs of all stakeholders across the business product owners, IT and any other stakeholders
• Negotiates change requests when required within the sprint

Planning & Organising

• Plans, organises and collaborates to ensure future requirements from other teams are in place for delivery of dependent objectives / goals (While dependencies are a reality in our context)
• Provides input and assessment of the Project Portfolio Management function
• Ensures there are alignment between teams by working closely with other Product Owners and understanding each others priorities and providing support where required
• Manages expectation and delivery timelines with stakeholders across the business

Team Management

• Represents all business needs within the development team. This requires a level of trust to be developed with business and to be extended from business.
• Identifies overlaps between and across all business areas
• Brings the right stakeholders and expertise together as and when needed to collaborate with the team
• Building strong relationships, good trust and accountability. Able to have crucial conversations with the team.
• Collaborates with BAs on activities like story splitting, requirement clarification and making sure functional and non-functional requirements are addressed
• Collaborates with other Product Owners and Project Managers on relevant dependencies and / or cross-functional feature sets
• Collaborates closely with the development team and various business stakeholders

Acceptance criteria and release pipeline

• Helps define acceptance criteria, ensuring that business is involved in this along with the team. This is helping define the definition of ready and done.
• Accepts or rejects the work of the development team before declaring done. This involves bringing in business with UAT.
• Effective release planning throughout the development process by deciding in which sequence features are to be released
• Accountable for the quality and delivery of the end product

Experience

• 4 Years experience as Product Owner, Business Analyst, Systems Analyst or experience in leading an IT team
• Experience in a Retail and/or Financial Services environment
• Experience in managing a project through all the steps in the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
• Experience in agile development practices

Qualifications

• Grade 12
• Degree in IT or Engineering
• Certified Product Owner (CPO) - Highly beneficial

Functional Knowledge and Skills

• Solid understanding of the product lifecycle
• In-depth understanding of Agile methodologies, technical understanding of products, and up-to-date on industry standards and best practices
• Business domain knowledge
• Data manipulation and interpretation
• Excellent written & verbal communication skills
• Good facilitation skills
• Prioritisation skills
• Product Backlog Management
• Entrepreneurial Mind-set
• Ability to work collaboratively with business and various stakeholders is essential
• Stakeholder Management
• Value Maximisation
• Quality Maximisation

Should you meet all the requirements and wish to apply, please send your latest CV and motivation to anthea@abcworldwide.com

ABC Worldwide