Product Owner, Platform Engineering
The Technology Division at WE is seeking an experienced Product Owner to join its Scrum-based development team focused on building core technical capabilities and services to power and scale the organization’s platform of digital products. Reporting to the Director of Digital Product Management, the Product Owner will be primarily responsible for interfacing with various organizational and external business units to capture, validate and document requirements for the Platform Engineering team. The Product Owner will work with the Scrum Master to groom backlog items and act as the core liaison between the client and delivery teams.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Communicate the vision and business value for products—particularly the use of scalable, reusable components and services—to all stakeholders;
- Manage relationships with internal and external business clients to determine their needs, translating these into validated product feature requirements;
- Document product feature requirements in user stories in collaboration with development team and other stakeholders, including clear mechanisms to track and analyze feature effectiveness;
- Lead feature validation activities where necessary in collaboration with Engineering and Product leads to ensure successful product operation and user satisfaction;
- Maintain intake channel to triage incoming work items for new and in-flight products;
- Prioritize feature list items from the backlog to suit business needs whilst balancing consideration of development capacity;
- Manage communication with business units to report status, negotiate delivery expectations and coordinate product handover;
- Manage communication with external partners to report status, understand technical requirements and verify functionality with engineering leads;
- Define and maintain measurable acceptance criteria for work items, including product performance, addressing of business needs and quality assurance.
- Capture and update technical documentation to ensure sustainable operation and ongoing maintenance of all technical solutions within portfolio.
What you bring
- Experience with fundamental technology concepts;
- Experience with product development processes and methodology;
- Familiarity with project management and collaborating within cross-disciplinary teams;
- Commitment to excellence in products and outcomes;
- Confidence in demonstrating strategic thinking;
- Desire and ability to learn, grow and lead in a multi-faceted, project-based environment;
- Strong verbal and written communication skills.
Preferred skills
- Qualifications or experience in user experience design;
- Understanding of digital technologies (e.g. SaaS platform architecture, RESTful services, single-page apps);
- Experience with capturing technical documentation (e.g. process maps, diagrams);
- Knowledge of Agile development principles and operating JIRA/equivalent ticket management software;
- Previous experience in Business Analyst capacity.
About the organization
WE is an organization with over 20 years of experience facilitating positive change in the world. Starting from humble beginnings as the youth-led charity, “Free the Children”, our core has always been about alleviating the causes of poverty and child labour. Since then, we have grown with social entrepreneurial spirit to nurture service learning in the education sector and usher socially conscious products in the retail sector. WE now empowers thousands of communities internationally under the unifying banner of making the world a better place.
Through this journey, we have leveraged technology to help deliver and amplify our efforts. We produce and support solutions for a diverse range of international customers—crossing from youth and educators to families and corporations—spanning across multiple application categories such as content distribution, e-commerce, travel and event logistics.
In continuing our mission, we aspire to deliver world-class products and user experiences. To achieve this, we want to work with world-class professionals who share our core belief that the world can truly be a better place if we all start thinking less about “ME”, and instead start living “WE”. Seeking more meaningful purpose in your career? We’d love to hear from you.
This position is based at WE’s head-office located in Toronto, ON.