MFC Product Owner (Agile)-1 (Pinelands) at Old Mutual South Africa

Job Description

In this role, you will form part of the Mass Foundation Cluster which is one of the largest customer-facing business segments in Old Mutual. Our vision is to be our customers' most trusted financial partner, passionate about helping them achieve their lifetime goals. Our mission is to enable positive futures for our customers, by bridging the gap between their resources and their financial service’s needs. Our primary goal is to facilitate access to financial solutions for our customers and to keep pace with their changing needs. Our target market is the low and emerging-middle income segment.

This role exists within the MFC Business Change Execution (BCE) area and is primarily responsible for working closely with the Product Manager and/or Business Owner and inputting into the strategy and product vision by focusing efforts on the team to drive delivery that meets customer needs. This role will report to the Product Owner Competency Lead.

The Product Owner works with the teams to take business requirements demand in the form of EPICS or Features, the Product Owner works closely with initiative and delivery teams to articulate and decompose the demand requirement into stories with acceptance criteria that meet the EPIC or Feature requirements. 

The Product Owner accepts all stories/requirements written by the team and ensures that stakeholder (of demand) expectations are effectively managed. To achieve this, the Product Owner must have (or develop) deep technical knowledge of how products are built and designed as they are embedded within the teams.  There is often overlap in roles between Product Managers/Business Owners and Product Owners – both can have input into Strategy, execution, and customer insight.  The Product Manager/Business Owner has overall responsibility for representing the customer, vision, and strategy, whilst the Product Owner has overall responsibility to work with the teams to understand the product vision as aligned with strategy and to execute the agreed plans.

The Product Owner is accountable for effective product backlog management which includes but is not only confined to:

• Co-crafting and communication of the product goal,
• Creating, maintaining and communicating of the product backlog demand/items,
• Prioritizing and sequencing the product backlog demand/items,
• Ensuring that the product backlog demand/items are transparent, visible, and well understood.
• Active involvement in a certain team, A.R.T & portfolio-level meetings:  Feature/Story refinement and writing (as required), PI Planning, Daily Stand Ups, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives and Planning, Product Owner, A.R.T. and management risk sync.
• Ensure alignment between work delivered and stakeholder expectations as defined in the EPIC, Feature and/or requirement demand objectives,
• Accountable for the long-term and short-term product roadmap.
• Understand and be actively involved in assisting the Scrum Master to enable the team to resolve impediments.
• Communicating risks effectively to stakeholders.
• Communicate and align with other Product Owners when inter-team dependencies and trade-offs are required to be solved.
• Make day-to-day decisions that will guide the team’s delivery and improve approaches that provide the team with decision autonomy.

A key aspect of the role is being available to answer questions from the team. Questions can arise at any time and any delay will impact the ability of the team to deliver. The most successful deliveries have fully engaged Product Owners working daily as an integral part of the team.

The Product Owner will make decisions at a team level to get work done. The Product Owner will represent the needs and requirements of the Product Manager/Business Owner and/or other stakeholders and should connect and work together closely with this group to ensure alignment.

Requirements

• An undergraduate qualification in Information Systems / Business Analysis or similar.
• Agile and relevant Product Owner/Product Manager certifications.
• 5 years plus experience in planning, analysis, design, and implementation of business & IT initiatives.
• Established and demonstratable proficiency in iterative development, understanding of agile principles (including Scale Agile), and prioritisation & sequencing techniques.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to communicate appropriately at all levels of the organisation; this includes written and verbal communications as well as visualisations.
• Good interpersonal skills, including influencing and persuasion skills.  Collaborates effectively with others to achieve personal and team results.
• Team player able to work effectively at all levels of an organisation with the ability to influence others to move toward consensus.
• Strong situational analysis and decision-making abilities.
• A strategic thinker who is customer-centric
• Pro-active, innovative, and creative thinker who can think outside the box.
• A solid balance of technical knowledge and business acumen with preference to insurance, financial & retail environments.