Product Owner

Our client is one of the fastest growing companies and industries driving innovation and digital strategy. Continuously on growing their team, they require a Product Owner to join their team.

The Product Owner is the point-of-contact for everything related to the product, acting as a bridge between the development team and the business. The PO interprets end user (consumer/customer) needs to define acceptance criteria, refine the backlog, and communicate priorities to the teams.

Accordingly, the PO will prioritize the work using a backlog and ensure that the work delivered is in line with end user (consumer/customer) needs to generate business value.

Key Areas of Responsibility

1. Product Vision and Planning

• Create and communicate the product vision and roadmap
• Provide boundaries to describe the realities within which the vision must be realized (e.g. time frames, external quality)
• Define product functionalities and prioritize business value
• Communicate the business benefits of the entire product and each individual feature
• Assist with the elaboration of Epics, Themes and Features into user stories that are granular enough to complete in a single   sprint.
• Create effective, well-researched requirements (User stories)
• Write clear acceptance criteria on User stories
• Continuously refine and prioritize the product backlog
• Conduct end user type demos of new and upcoming functionality
• Gather user feedback (analytics, A/B tests) and define product enhancements

2. Product Development

• Motivate the team to subscribe to the product vision
• Set team release and sprint goals and objectives that help fulfill the vision
• Attend and actively participate in scrum meetings such as sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint          retrospectives
• Day-to-day support of development and QA team members by continuously answering
• questions to add detail to the requirements
• Day to day monitoring of key metrics that help in tracking and forecasting progress
• Escalate issues to the Executive team when required
• Responsible for stopping a sprint in tandem with the Scrum Master if the original goal no longer
• meets a business need
• Responsible for changing the course of the release at the end of every Sprint if required
• Work with the Business Analyst to ensure that user stories are in a Ready state for the Dev and QA teams
• Work with the Scrum Master to ensure cohesion in the team process
• Validate the user stories implemented by validating the acceptance criteria and accepting or rejecting them
• Decide whether to ship the product

3. Product Support and Communication

• Support product marketing, customer service and sales for day-to-day operations and issues
• Support sales & marketing on product-specific positioning, marketing and business needs
• Represent company on product-specific communications (roadmap, feature requests, KPIs: key performance indicators)
• Inform management, stakeholders, and sponsors on how the product vision is aligned with their wishes

Requirements

• Bachelor degree in Business, Marketing, or equivalent business experience
• 2-3 years of experience as a product owner in a software environment with Agile/Scrum development
• Strong track record in partnering with development teams
• Strong analytical, technical, verbal and written communication skills
• Good technical background to engage with the Scrum team when technical issues arise that impact delivery of business requirements

Competencies that are considered assets:

• Certified Product Owner (CSPO, PSPO I)
• Familiar with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• Familiar with LeanUX