NLA Media Access represents the intellectual property rights of over 5,000 newspaper, magazine titles and websites from around 275 publishers, and provides data, search, and content feed services to media monitoring agencies and publishers with a database of over 70 million articles.
We are looking for a product owner for our technology department. You’ll be responsible for translating business objectives into technical specifications, providing vision and direction to development teams, and serving as a subject matter expert and analyst/consultant, to understand customer’s needs, gather & document requirements. You’ll work closely with suppliers who provide external development and operations, as well as with our internal technical and commercial teams.
To be successful in this role you will be enthusiastic, curious with a desire to learn, committed to collaboration, and have excellent attention to detail. You will understand lean and agile principles, with proven experience in prioritising work based on conflicting needs. Previous experience working with products and services delivered via APIs is a must.
The role reports into the Head of Operations and Service Delivery which is part of the technology & digital team. The team was previously London-based but is now permanently working fully remote, allowing you to work from anywhere within the UK. Alternatively you can work flexibly at our bright and spacious head quarters in Royal Tunbridge Wells with onsite parking available and only a 5 minute walk from the station.
Responsibilities
- Run the Product planning process, creating realistic release plans and managing stakeholder expectations for the delivery of new features
- Providing vision and direction to development team, ensuring work focuses on maximising business value
- Serve as a subject matter expert and analyst/consultant, to understand customer’s needs, gather & document requirements
- Help clients and stakeholders understand the best mix of technologies, design solutions and services and how they should be delivered to maximise effectiveness
- Work and collaborate with internal teams and on and offshore 3rd party suppliers, adapting your communications approach to meet the business demands
- Work to understand the intersection between technology, customers and business to cultivate business development opportunities
- Understand and stay abreast of current and emerging digital trends, unique opportunities and challenges of the space/markets and geographies in which NLA’s clients and publishers operate, and how it affects their business and initiatives
- Support from time to time in a consultative/pre-sales role working with the commercial team
- Use market analysis and data insights to identify growth and development opportunities
- Work with the delivery manager to develop product backlogs and where appropriate sprint plans, in line with the product vision, prioritising effectively on multiple dimensions – making sure the urgent doesn’t always outdo the important; that there is a balance between commercial work, new opportunities, maintenance, and fixing issues / technical debt.
- Lead and facilitate needs-driven workshops with internal teams as well as clients
- Clearly translate business objectives into technical specifications including user stories, acceptance criteria, process diagrams and interface wireframes to support accurate estimations, delivery timelines and team productivity.
- Ensure any up-coming work is adequately refined and elaborated and is ready for behavioural driven development just-in-time
- Take responsibility for the definition of done, working with QA teams to validate work and enable continuous deployment to reduce Work-In-Progress
- Consistently and proactively strive to improve the quality of the work and tweak processes (practice Kaizen)
- Ensure any user documentation is suitably comprehensive and up to date
- Work across multiple products, whilst ensuring focus and a drive towards simplicity.
- Prepare and conduct product demonstrations, prototype demonstrations, proof of concepts and development roadmaps to internal and client audiences, showing demonstrate how deliveries contribute towards OKRs
- Work closely with the senior members of the technology team to align Technology Vision and Product Vision into a single roadmap
Requirements
- Thorough understanding of Scrum Agile and Kanban development principles using relevant working tools
- Previous experience working as a Product Owner or Technical Business Analyst in a commercial agile environment
- A product mindset, with a focus on delivering customer value
- Experience of launching several new productsFamiliar with emerging digital trends and their application in the industry
- Able to understand high level business ideas, impact assess and break them down to facilitate service design and delivery
- Strong Agile mindset and familiarity with other development methodologies
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage, influence, and inspire partners and stakeholders
- A passion for collaboration – as a natural facilitator you’ll look to bring people into conversations and workshops to ensure true collaboration
- Proven experience in prioritising work based on conflicting needs
- A drive for focusing on outcomes, not outputs
- A desire to work with new technologies, platforms and delivery approaches
- Detailed working knowledge of systems development and implementation
- Commercial awareness, ensuring systems development is aligned with contractual agreements
- Strong knowledge of customer facing and internal infrastructure and technology trends, particularly those relating to media monitoring and/or publishing
- Proven ability to analyse complex systems, draw conclusions and produce solutions
- Proven ability to define and document functional and non-functional system specifications for large, complex systems
- Proven ability to build effective working relations with people at all levels inside and outside the organisation and influence people at all levels, including negotiating and successfully facilitating joint decision-making
- Skilled at multi-tasking and balancing a number of complex work activities including; requirements elicitation and management, interviewing skills, backlog refinement and estimation, prioritisation and acceptance management
- Strong written and verbal communication skills including ability to talk through complex information in a way that non-technical stakeholders can assimilate, as well as being able to present business value descriptions of requirements to a highly technical developer audience
- Previous experience working with APIs
- Experienced in defining user journeys and stories
- Pragmatic approach to solving problems, and an understanding that less is often more.
- Agile evangelist – supporting and working with your team to continually challenge and improve how the team approaches problems and delivers value.
- Ability to work in a team with minimal supervision
Benefits
- Private Healthcare Plan
- Pension Plan
- Life Assurance
- Work From Home
- Training & Development
- Employee Assistance Programme
Salary up to £60,000 depending on experience, plus 20% discretionary performance related bonus.