Product Owner

As a Product Owner you need to understand the vision of the product from the point of view of the customer, company strategic direction and key stakeholders. You are the conduit between the customer, the business and the development team.

Product Owners lead by example with an engaging open style and energy that people trust and believe in. You will be passionate about software products, agile development practices, and delivering customer value.

Aquila Heywood are committed to using Agile Development Methods (including Scrum and Lean) in order to deliver customer value rapidly and continuously.

You will join a team of 5 Product Owners and will be responsible for 2 Agile Scrum teams, working closely with Product Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts, Developers and Testers.

Responsibilities:

To the Product:

  • Act as an Agile Product Owner, retaining focus on core Agile principles.
  • Align the scrum teams with the value to be delivered, ensuring the scrum teams understand the “why” as well as the “what”
  • Make difficult and complex prioritisation decisions
  • Maintain and prioritise the backlog to ensure that the team is working on stories that maximize business value and deliver necessary fixes and functionality to all customers.
  • Facilitate customer collaboration during development (B2B), ensuring customer needs will be fulfilled
  • Work with the Product Manager to identify, understand, prepare and develop business outcomes.
  • Communicate new features externally to our customers and internally to our staff.
  • Encourage the scrum teams to experiment with ideas and utilise UX practices
  • Support benefit recognition activity after release

To Your Scrum Team:

  • Creating, Maintaining and Prioritisation of the Product Backlog.
  • Attend and support Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings.
  • Clearly communicate the business needs and value to the Scrum Team.
  • Work with the teams to split business outcomes into user stories and refine those stories
  • Be present. Be available every day to team to answer any question. Share feedback from customer, stakeholder or any other learning from customer visit or research.
  • Coordinate SME and customer input
  • Promote a culture of Continuous Improvement.

To the Company:

  • Maintain excellent communication with stakeholders from around the business
  • Support and contribute to the continuous improvement of our product delivery pipeline including skills, technologies, processes and tools
  • Endeavour to live the company values on a daily basis

To Yourself:

  • Be continually developing yourself and your career
  • Build and maintain effective professional relationships with all Stakeholders

You will need to:

  • Collaborate with stakeholders during the visioning and concept development of a product.
  • Assess value, develop cases, and prioritize stories, epics and themes to ensure work focuses on those with maximum value that are aligned with product strategy.
  • Work with the scrum teams to create, refine, estimate and deliver user stories for each business outcome.
  • User Story refinement – Lead Workshops with scrum teams and/or customers.
  • Define clear Acceptance Criteria per User Story in partnership with our analysts and testers.
  • Manage the backlog for sprint and release planning.
  • Ensure the scrum teams are always “fed”, keeping the highest value work moving through whilst optimising the amount of work in progress. Focus the teams on user needs and “jobs to be done”.
  • Support the scrum meetings, particularly sprint reviews, team product backlog refinement and sprint planning sessions
  • Define Software release plan and scope
  • Escalation of Risks and Blockers

Required Skills & Abilities:

  • Ability to identify, articulate and communicate value
  • Agile environment experience & understanding
  • Strong stakeholder management and communication
  • Able to make difficult and complex prioritisation decisions
  • Team leadership skills, able to empower others to achieve goals
  • Organising and prioritising a backlog maintenance
  • Comfortable presenting to others

Desirable skills & experience:

  • Experience of working within a Product team
  • Experience in Agile methods (with a particular focus on Scrum)
  • Knowledge and understanding of pensions or financial industry
  • Knowledge and understanding of administrative processes
  • Experience of working collaboratively with customers (B2B)
  • Experience using Jira and Confluence