The Company
Our mission at CyberOwl is to shift organisations towards an active security posture. Our first product, Medulla, is a passive, protective monitoring system for connected industrial systems for early signs of cyber-physical attacks. We have a growing presence in various industrial sectors such as utilities and a heavy presence within maritime. CyberOwl has won several accolades, was shortlisted for the Lloyds Science of Risk Prize, selected into the first GCHQ Cyber Accelerator Programme and is a founding member of the UK Government’s centre of excellence for cybersecurity innovation – the London Office for Rapid Cybersecurity Advancement (LORCA).
The Product
Our product comprises multiple components which work in unison with our managed services to deliver value to our customer. The main components are:
- Sensor – concerned with acquisition of network, host and log data from within an operational environment. Designed to enable remote, unassisted deployments.
- Local unit – receives data from sensors, exchanges data with cloud and provides local services such as alerting. A key feature is the ability to handle intermittent connectivity back to the cloud. Key technologies used include Log Stash plugins and Kafka.
- Cloud analytics – receives data from multiple local units and applies rules-based and machine learning algorithms to identify security and compliance issues. Key technologies include Kubernetes. Exposes data to our UI and third party integrations via API
- User interface – presents the intelligence from our analytics. Optimised for operational, asset-centric views. Desktop based but with potential to extend to mobile devices. Uses single-page application methodologies.
The Opportunity
As our pioneering Senior Product Manager, you will work closely with the Chief Security Officer (who also acts as Product Director) and the Leadership Team (particularly CEO and CTO) to help drive our product roadmap.
You will join a close-knit, dynamic team consisting of cyber security, product development, technology and market experts. This position is ideal for an individual who has 5+ years’ product management experience, is now looking to take on a Senior Product Manager role and gain more strategic experience working closely with the Leadership Team. They are looking for experience taking a refining and building on a relatively new product and finding and achieving product market fit in new verticals and geographies. They will be looking to take ownership of applying best practice product management strategies, tactics and frameworks in a complex B2B software product business. You will be exposed to a range of industrial sectors (starting with the maritime and energy / smart grid sectors) and geographically diverse customer / user groups (starting with Northern and Mediterranean Europe, and Southeast Asia).
You will probably not enjoy our working environment if you struggle to build relationships with distributed teams with diverse ways of working, avoid challenges or prefer working in a silo rather than collaboratively.
CyberOwl are widely recognised as market innovators. We have a bias for action and our team pride themselves on their ability to plan, execute and iterate campaigns at a rapid pace. We are also remarkably diverse. 11 nationalities, 12 languages, 1000 dialects (including bogan and brummie) and a couple of owls. We are dotted across the UK, Greece and Singapore.
Role Overview
The role is most closely recognisable as the Product Owner in typical agile product development and scrum frameworks. However, there are elements that combine responsibilities of the Scrum Master. We recognise the risks of combining these roles. However, we expect this to be a temporary (6-12 months) arrangement and over time and as the product development team expands, we would expect the individual to focus more heavily on the Product Owner role.
Developing an understanding of customer need
- Capture customer and other user/ stakeholder pain points / jobs to be done
- Develop, perform or support customer / user research strategies and activities.
- Apply user research frameworks and techniques to identify requirements. Note there is currently no separate dedicated customer / user research team
- Apply Design Thinking (or similar UX/design frameworks) to uncover and crystallise customer / user needs, wants, goals, fears and frustrations
- Establishing product-market fit as we extend into new verticals and geographies
- Developing “sales enablement” product features e.g. packaging / modularising features to explore freemium models or modular pricing
Translating needs into outcomes and requirements
- Apply product management frameworks to translate jobs-to-be-done into product features
- Defining the product problem statement(s)
- Work with CSO to agree outcomes (changes in customer behaviour) and define outputs
- Apply a hypothesis and testing driven approach to defining and refining requirements
Assessing and prioritising features and outputs
- Assess features and drive consensus for viability, feasibility and desirability, working closely with the leadership, development, security analyst and service teams
- Prioritise (and deprioritise) features within our roadmap
- Document decisions and plans for presentation at customer advisory boards and internal product boards
Maximising value of the development team
- Build basic UI designs to communicate requirement to UI developers
- Develop understanding and assess data pipeline, API and other back end requirements
- Work with the CTO, architects and other technical colleagues to translate features into building blocks for development
- Facilitate effective collaboration and communication between teams
- Identify dependencies, manage and coach on handling edge cases
Leading the Scrum
- Coordinate sprints, retrospective meetings and daily stand-ups and the other scrum ceremonies
- Track progress of development against roadmap
- Monitor quality of the development and proactively manage issues arising
- Keep up to date with best practises in agile development and champion them within CyberOwl when appropriate.
Supporting product marketing, service and onboarding
- Support product marketing activities, definition of release versions and associated customer education
- Support service team with product release into live customer and internal testing environments
Person Specification
Professional/Education Level
ESSENTIAL
- 4+ years of professional experience in product management for B2B software products
- 2+ years’ experience as Scrum master in agile development teams
DESIRABLE
- Relevant experience in cyber security, critical national infrastructure, industrial or manufacturing sectors
- Experience of working in Series A or growth-stage startups.
Knowledge
ESSENTIAL
- Excellent working knowledge of product management frameworks, covering:
- Prioritisation frameworks e.g. Kano
- Agile product management
- UX / Design frameworks e.g. Design Thinking
- Good working knowledge of product management tools, in particular Miro
- Excellent working knowledge of project management tools, in particular Jira
DESIRABLE
- Working knowledge of the Jobs to be Done framework
- Product / data research techniques and tools e.g. Python scripting, data science techniques
- UI design and tooling e.g. Adobe XD
Experience
ESSENTIAL
- Evidence of successful Product Owner experience with B2B software products
- Evidence of successful Scrum Master experience for small development teams
- Evidence of facilitating internal communication and effective collaboration
- Evidence of resolving conflicts and removing obstacles that occur
- Evidence of working with geographically dispersed teams.
DESIRABLE
- Experience of working in roles that combine both the Product Owner and Scrum Master roles. Able to evidence understanding of risks and safeguards for such a role.
- Experience of cloud based technologies and solutions such as AWS, Kubernetes and Docker.
- Experience of API driven architectures leveraging Websockets and RESTful services.
- Experience of time series databases and event driven architectures.
Personal Skills/Qualities
ESSENTIAL
- Obsessed with delighting clients and delivering quality
- Demonstrate innovativeness and resourcefulness.
- Be comfortable working in a start-up environment and thrive on change.
- Be methodical with an aptitude for analytical thinking and an eye for detail.
- Be inquisitive and questioning. Be open minded and learn from those around you.
DESIRABLE
- Passion and interest in innovation, cybersecurity or technology
- Interest in the maritime, energy or industrial sectors