Product Owner Life and Funeral at Vodacom

Role Purpose

The Product Owner Life and Funeral based within Vodacom Financial Services.

Role purpose: 

• The Product Owner owns the Life & Funeral Products end to end, from product design, development, monitoring, financial results and KPIs
• The Product Owner represents the business stakeholders and is the voice of the customer guiding individual DevOps teams, responsible for ensuring that the delivery team delivers value to the business according to the outcome vision
• This role is responsible for the definition of customer-centric items or user stories from the capability/feature roadmap, ranking and prioritizing them, and adding them to the team backlog
• This role will work closely with the Release Train Engineer/Agile Programme Manager and Scrum Master in coordinating day to day activities such as sprint planning, retrospectives and other agile functions to ensure collaboration and effective delivery of user stories against commercial milestone objectives
• Product owner works to Agile principles, and will be responsible for the prioritization and delivery of the backlog of change initiatives to maximize business benefit of the products and features we offer. The rote works closely with the team to develop user stories, acceptance criteria and full business benefits, and convey the vision onwards to our in-house Scrum teams, or, where required, to our Offshore development partners
• Working with the actuarial team on product development and pricing
• Supporting the sales team for distribution of the Life and Funeral products
• Commercial negotiations with partners
• Deep understanding and ownership of the Life and Funeral product profit and loss statement
   

Your responsibilities will include:

• Own product end to end from design, development and results monitoring
• Own, drive, and focus the team on delivery of business value and content
• Develop and define user stories / items and acceptance criteria from the feature and capability roadmap
• Rank and prioritize user stories / items and add them to the team backlog for sprint development, conveying a clear vision of what is required to be built
• Approve the final release plan and accept all deliverables against defined user stories and acceptance criteria
• Analyse and report delivery risks and opportunities, and engage stakeholders for communications and decision-making
• Participate in retrospectives to identify improvement opportunities
• Acts as single point of business contact for the DevOps team
• Manage the financial plan for the delivery team, providing forecasts
• Deliver on KPIs for the Life and Funeral products
   

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Experience in Long Term Insurance product development and implementation
• Excellent problem solving skills, with the ability to minimize overhead tasks for the team and manage interdependences with other teams
• Excellent relationship building and influencing skills, with the ability to foster an inclusive team culture
• Excellent business acumen and understanding of the role of the capability in contributing to business value
• In-depth understanding of both the current Telecommunications and digital. services market and emerging business and technology trends
• A strong customer-centric focus, with an entrepreneurial mindset Ability to function with a high degree of autonomy
• Strong financial management skills and acumen
• Strong time-management skills, with the ability to juggle multiple balls, and comfortable working under pressure 
• Excellent verbal and written communications and collaboration skills, with the ability to work closely with the delivery team to deliver user stories 
• Flexible with planning and work estimation, managing and empowering the team (without needing to micromanage), able to continuously balance between the customer and commercial needs 
• Digital/software product ownership in large scale environments
• User story definition and refinement 
• Expertise in Agile software development environment and methods
• Market research, design thinking, and lean start-up methods; business modelling
• Customer experience design of digital products and services
• Analytics / AB / multivariate testing and related tools
• Data-driven decision making

Must have technical / professional qualifications: 

• Newly or nearly qualified Actuary (FASSA, FIA) 
• Bachelor’s Degree in Actuarial Science, Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, Engineering or other related field
• A total of eight or more years experience of which at least three or more years is in the successful delivery in Product Ownership (or equivalent role) across full product lifecycles and financial aspects of the product
• Experience in successfully Leading and mentoring agile / DevOps teams in Large multi-team environments
• Experience in agile methodologies, such as Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP), Test Driven Design and Behavioural Driven Design
• Experience in successful delivery against financial / resource constraints
• Experience in the use of analytics and AB / multivariate testing
• Experience with requirements definition and use case modelling
• Professional experience and knowledge of the Telecommunications industry strongly preferred