Junior Product Owner (Front End Design)

Company Description

We’re people on a mission to help schools use data more effectively to save teachers time and improve student outcomes. Data at the moment is more of a burden than a benefit to teachers. Schools are increasingly required to store vast amounts of information, such as attendance, behaviour and assessment of students, which takes teachers hours and hours a week to input and often isn’t used effectively to improve student performance.

We’ve built a system that improves the input, analysis and communication of school information, saving teachers days of precious time and allowing them to target student interventions more effectively to improve the outcomes of hundreds of thousands of children. Imagine taking the register on your mobile, then having the system instantly text all parents whose child was not in school asking them to confirm absence by texting the school back. Easy. Next, imagine that the system knows how serious an absence is by comparing it to the past 10 years of each student’s attendance, and shows teachers whether this drop is unusual for that particular child in order to recommend an intervention before that child drops out.

Since our launch 5 years ago, we’ve raised venture capital from top-tier, socially-minded investors, expanded to 60 people in 3 countries, and are now working with thousands of schools, helping them to improve outcomes for hundreds of thousands of students. We care about our social goals as much as our business targets, and want to make a lasting, positive impact across the education sector. We’re looking for passionate, curious, ambitious people who share our ethos and want to make an impact at scale.

About You

Our Product team is expanding and we have an exciting opportunity for a Junior Product Owner to join our Front End Design team in our London office. As a Junior Product Owner at Arbor you will be part of an innovative team in a fast-paced, growing business. You will report directly into our Senior Design Product Manager and be responsible for developing and managing delivery of functionality in our front end platform. We’re looking for a meticulous, driven team player to work alongside our engineers and designers to develop and improve our front end platform.

We’re a talented team of designers and developers in the Front End Design team, looking to bring the right person in. We’re looking to give you trust, support, and enable you to have pride in the quality of your work. We work together closely and collaboratively with our fantastic product managers and customer success representatives.

As a member of a platform team, supporting our innovative Enterprise SaaS offering, you’ll need to be super organised and able to balance pressures from many stakeholders. This is much harder than it sounds! To do this you’ll need to have a high attention to detail, a great internal barometer for impact, and a big passion for improving school outcomes. You’ll be expected to dig-deep, collaborate, get involved, and lead elements of our creative process, bringing passion, excitement and finesse to our creative work. You’ll need to show an entrepreneurial edge, and the ability to think on your feet; we’re looking for someone who can grow with us and step up to take a senior role in our company.

About Us

As a team, we love to create enjoyable, simple and elegant solutions through a design led, collaborative, and user-test driven process. Every team member has a deep commitment to our company mission, and each of us love finding better ways to bring delight and simplicity to the lives of those in schools.

We’re an enterprise product, meaning every stakeholder in the school interacts with us, from teachers and parents to headteachers and the governing body. This means you’ll be working across multiple stakeholders, with overlapping and sometimes complex use cases. The solutions we design need to work across these requirements, and also across devices! There’s never a dull moment!

The Role – As Junior Product Owner in the Front End Design team, your duties and responsibilities will include:

  • Learn the tools and methodologies of Product Management, as well as the current functions that make up our front end platform.
  • Support delivery of the roadmap against agreed business targets.
  • Support the creation and prioritisation of requirements, backlogs, and use cases through customer feedback, interviews and observations of school stakeholders.
  • Work using agile methodologies and with UX teams to produce wireframes and flows to ensure roadmaps are achieved within agreed timeframes.
  • Effectively manage and work with a distributed workforce of designers and engineers to deliver prioritised backlog in readiness for take to market.
  • Support the team in developing features that help people in schools use our products more effectively. Supporting and leading elements of the product management agenda as a whole.
  • Effectively test and evaluate new development work to ensure that the highest standards of quality are maintained.
  • Support the day to day in-life management of front end products including, business and training queries, reporting on product performance and issue resolution.
  • Take full ownership of the outcome of our work. Sharing the success with the team and learning from mistakes.
  • Help communicate and market the solutions and features developed, increasing engagement and NPS metrics.
  • Act as product expert / champion when engaging with other business areas.
  • Conduct ongoing research to understand our business, market & channels to aid product decision making.