Product Manager at Pepkor Payments & Lending

Key Performance Areas

Develop and Implement Vision, Goals and Measurement (Collaborative Process)

• Brings together and takes ownership of the product vision and ensures this is communicated into the team.
• Customer journeys, business processes and their associated performance metrics.
• Identify product domain boundaries and grow relevant product domain knowledge.
• Solution architecture, in-line with IT systems architecture goals.
• Negotiates and takes ownership of product goals and Business Objectives.
• Measures the inherent and commercial value created by the product over time, especially after deployments.
• Ensure alignment between all business stakeholders and IT in vision and goals.

Manages the Product Line (Including Backlog)

• Calculates/understands the value and risk of items.
• Create and maintain a detailed product roadmap that outlines the development, launch, and enhancement of product features and releases.
• Prioritize features, enhancements, and bug fixes based on business impact, customer needs, and resource availability.
• Prioritises the product backlog in order of value, risk, or business importance in collaboration / consultation with business owners / stakeholders and the Agile team.
• Ensures the backlog is visible to all stakeholders.
• Actively involved in product backlog refinement (With entire team and at times business).
• Actively creates clarity to the level required (based on context of the team) and leverages the team to create clarity too.
• Guides and ensures clarity at least 2 sprints ahead of time for the sprints.
• Balances the conflicting needs of all stakeholders across the business product owners, IT, and any other stakeholders.
• Negotiating change requests when required within the sprint.
• Helps define acceptance criteria, ensuring that business is involved in this along with the team.  This helps define the definition of ready and done.
• Accepts or rejects the work of the development team before declaring done.  This involves bringing in business with UAT
• Is accountable along with the team for delivery on time and of quality.
• Balances the conflicting needs of all stakeholders across the business product owners, IT, and any other stakeholders.
• Negotiating change requests when required within the sprint.
• Helps define acceptance criteria, ensuring that business is involved in this along with the team.  This helps define the definition of ready and done.
• Accepts or rejects the work of the development team before declaring done.  This involves bringing in business with UAT
• Is accountable along with the team for delivery on time and of quality.

Risk Mitigation

• Assists the Head: Product Portfolio in managing disruption (Operations have a high priority; we need stability to manage this).
• Highlight potential and real risk to the Head: Product Portfolio – also present possible mitigators to resolve conflict
• Risk should be highlighted in a timeously fashion – as far as possible highlight risk as early as possible to prevent negative impact on company, team or deliverable.

Manage and Lead Business Analyst Team

• Provide Leadership, Coaching and Mentorship to the BA Team.
• Provider leadership to the BA Team to ensure delivery on agreed priorities.
• Work with the BA’s to ensure work delivered to the It Teams and other Business Areas is of high quality and meet the agreed requirements.
• Facilitate effective communication and collaboration among teams to achieve product goals.
• Develop clear and actionable product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Ensure requirements are communicated effectively to all other cross-functional teams.

Stakeholder Management

• Collaborates closely with the development team and various business stakeholders.
• Collaborates with all business stakeholders to arrive at the vision, goals, priorities, and business objectives.
• Collaborate and work with BAs on activities like story splitting, requirement clarification and making sure functional and non-functional requirements are addressed.
• Collaborates with other Product Managers on relevant dependencies and / or cross-functional feature sets. Builds trust with business to make decisions around the product.  
• Works with business stakeholders at their need for level of detail and involvement.
• Decisions are collaborative and the job of the PM is to bring the right people together to get finality on decisions.
• Consults and Maintains Relationships with business stakeholders in Pepkor Payments and Lending (PPL)
• Identify and address product-related issues and challenges promptly.
• Develop and implement solutions to overcome obstacles and ensure successful product outcomes.

Requirements
Qualifications

• Grade 12
• Relevant Diploma or Degree in IT or Business Administration
• Certified Product Owner (CPO) – Highly beneficial 

Experience

• Minimum 5-years in a leadership role, plus 5 years’ previous experience as a Product Owner or Product Manager.
• Experience of software development processes and technologies. Experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies is a plus.