Product Owner - Johannesburg, Parktown at PPS

Job Advert Summary    

• The Product Owner (PO) is a member of the Agile Team responsible for defining Stories and prioritizing the Team Backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the Features or components for the team. The PO has a significant role in maximizing the value produced by the team and ensuring Stories meet the user’s needs and comply with the Definition of Done.
• Within PPS, the PO is responsible for the lifecycle of the product, from the minimally viable product (MVP) to decommissioning, working closely with Product Development, Design Authorities, Architecture, Security, IT Operations, Academy and Service Delivery teams.
• This role has significant relationships and responsibilities outside the local team, including working with Product Management, Customers, Business Owners, and other stakeholders.

Minimum Requirements    
Education:

• Bachelor’s degree or Diploma in Computer Science or Information Science or Information Technology
• Certified Product Owner (SAFe POPM)

Experience:

• Essential : 4 years’ experience leading teams in an Agile environment in IT, Financial Services or Consulting.
• Preferred : 2-3 years’ experience in Business Analysis, Product Owner or Scrum Master role.

Knowledge and Skills (maximum of 10):

• Scrum/Agile software development methodologies
• Software development knowledge
• Coding and designing knowledge
• Product development architecture.
• User Experience knowledge and principles
• Business Process and Analysis
• Product backlog understanding and management
• User stories knowledge
• Ability to use tools and apps.

Competencies (maximum of 8):

• Creative and Innovative Thinking
• Decisiveness
• Development orientation
• Effective communication
• Enabling team success
• Interpersonal effectiveness
• Planning and organising
• Quality orientation

Duties and Responsibilities    

• Product Increment Planning, Iteration Execution, Program Execution, Inspect and Adapt.

The Product Owner fulfills the following duties:

• Preparation and Participation in PI Planning
• As a member of the extended Product Management team, the PO is heavily involved in program backlog refinement and prep for Program Increment (PI) planning and plays a significant role in the planning event itself. Before the planning event, the PO updates the team backlog and typically reviews and contributes to the program vision, Roadmap, and content presentations.
• During the event, the PO is involved with story definition, providing the clarifications necessary to assist the team with their story estimates and sequencing. The entire Agile team, which includes the PO, also work together to determine their team PI objectives for the upcoming PI.

Iteration Execution

• Maintaining the team backlog – With input from Architecture, DevSecOps and other stakeholders, the PO has the primary responsibility for building, editing, and maintaining the team backlog. Consisting mostly of user stories, it also includes defects and enablers. Backlog items are prioritized based on user value, time, and other team dependencies determined in the PI planning event and refined during the PI.
• Iteration Planning – The PO reviews and reprioritizes the backlog as part of the prep work for Iteration Planning, including coordination of dependencies with other POs. During the iteration planning event, the PO communicates story detail and priorities and ensures the team aligns and agrees on a final iteration plan.
• Story elaboration – Most backlog items are elaborated into user stories for implementation. This may happen before the iteration, during iteration planning, or during the iteration. While any team member can write stories and acceptance criteria, the PO maintains proper flow.
• Apply Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) – POs collaborate with their team to detail stories with acceptance criteria and examples in the form of acceptance tests.
• Accepting stories – The PO works with the team to agree on accepted story completion. This includes validating that the story meets acceptance criteria, that it has the appropriate, persistent acceptance tests, and that it otherwise complies with its Definition of Done (DoD). In so doing, the PO also assures a level of quality, focusing primarily on fitness for use.
• Understand enabler work – While POs are not expected to drive technological decisions, they are supposed to understand the scope of the upcoming enabler work and collaborate with Architecture and DevSecOps to assist with decision-making and sequencing of the critical technological infrastructures that will host the new business functionality. This can often be best accomplished by establishing a capacity allocation.
• Participate in team demo and retrospective – POs collaborate with their team and any other stakeholders in the team demo. They also participate in the Iteration Retrospective, where the teams gather to improve their processes and are active in the Agile Release Train’s (ART’s) Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop.

Program Execution

• During each PI, the PO coordinates dependencies with other POs. This often occurs in weekly PO sync events.
• The PO also has an instrumental role in producing the System Demo for program and Value Stream stakeholders.

Inspect and Adapt

• The PO works across teams to define and implement improvement stories that will increase the velocity and quality of the program at the Inspect and Adapt workshop.
• The PI system demo is part of the Inspect and Adapt workshop. The PO has an instrumental role in producing the PI system demo for program stakeholders. To ensure that they will be able to show the most critical aspects of the solution to the stakeholders, POs also participate in the preparation of the PI system demo.