Platform Product Owner

The Platform Product Owner will be responsible for working with key business stakeholders, other teams across the business, and internal team members to understand and take in requirements, turning them into deliverable user stories/tickets and overseeing their delivery into a production state within the cross-functional team, consisting of developers, quality assurance testers and operational systems staff.

Responsibilities

Accountability

• Ensure that all team members understand the importance of production issues, and that accountability is shared across the team, according to the various competencies in the team.
• Accept responsibility for delivery of work into a production-ready state.
• Accept accountability for the health of the system with the team, with the responsibility for this residing with the Ops team.

Product Strategy and Vision

• Collaborate with senior leadership and key stakeholders to craft a coherent product vision and strategy that aligns with company objectives.
• Continuously maintain the product roadmap to provide insight to the organization on when deliverables will be available, thus allowing for early commercialization of product features.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Function as the central conduit between stakeholders and the team, ensuring clear communication about product specifications, priorities, and deliverables.
• Manage stakeholder expectations, including obtaining clear requirements from stakeholders
• Engage and work closely with key business stakeholders to understand business requirements.
• Understand the user, including understanding approaches and technologies for learning about the user. These include user interviews, surveys, design studios, and other user experience design approaches. Users include team members, principally the Operations sub-team.
• Enhance the profile of the workstream and team internally, by building strong relationships with stakeholders across the business

Communication

• Ensure that communication within the team is clear and well understood by all members to ensure effective and efficient delivery of features and tasks.
• Consult and engage with other product owners to share best practices, highlight inter-team dependencies, and maintain the product owner competency within company.
• Communicate clearly with Chapter Leads about team roles, key performance indicators and the efficiency of the team members.

Backlog Management

• Meticulously manage the product backlog, aligning it with the broader product strategy.
• Be able to prioritize work when presented with a variety of conflicting goals and opinions.
• Break down complex product directives into manageable tasks, formulating clear user stories or requirements for actionable progression.

Delivery Management

• Identify software releases consisting of various components to meet specific business needs.
• Be responsible for the systematic delivery of new solutions and bespoke developments, leading the team to successful live deployments for external or internal customers.
• Evaluate work outcomes from the team against pre-set acceptance criteria, sanctioning or revising the delivered solutions.
• Ensure that products meet and excel in quality benchmarks.
• Present solutions to the company Change Advisory Board (CAB) for acceptance and promotion into the production environment. Relevant team members should be present in the session to ensure that technicalities can be dealt with.

Internal team collaboration

• Through effective inspirational leadership, foster accountability in the team who understand and strive to meet the needs of all stakeholders.
• Providing product vision and direction to the team and stakeholders.
• Ensure that the team always has an adequate amount of prior prepared user stories/tickets to work on.
• Exhibit role model behaviour and motivate team members in line with the core values.
• Work to ensure team cohesion and inclusivity.
• Facilitate the flow of work between the sub-teams, from Development to QA and to Ops.
• In the event of production issues, co-ordinate the relevant team members from Development, QA and Ops to work together to solve problems in a timely fashion.

Self Management

• Follow through to ensure that personal quality and productivity standards are consistently and accurately maintained.
• Demonstrate consistent application of internal procedures.
• Plan and prioritise, demonstrating abilities to manage competing demands.
• Demonstrate abilities to anticipate and manage change.
• Demonstrate flexibility in balancing achievement of own objectives with abilities to understand and respond to organisational needs.

Qualifications and Experience

• A bachelors degree in business, IT, or a relevant field and/or
• Proven experience as a Platform Product Owner or in a similar capacity within an Agile framework.
• Acquaintance with Agile tenets, irrespective of strict Scrum conventions.
• Strong analytical acumen and a knack for problem-solving.
• Exceptional communication abilities and leadership flair.