Product Owner - Public Web at Old Mutual South Africa

Job Description

The Product Owner is responsible for delivery and shaping the online / web vision and roadmaps that impact millions of Old Mutual Customers across Africa. The role serves as the primary contact for all aspects of the organizations website(s), handling a range of responsibilities that may include overall web health management, commercialization, web design and development, routine site and content maintenance, and various updates to ensure sites align with the goals and objectives of the organization. This role also carries the responsibility of solving customer needs and the full end-to-end client experience.

Product and customer champion

• Responsible for the strategic vision and execution of the client experience.
• Develop and maintain a vision for the websites across Old Mutual Regions and is responsible for communicating that vision to the organisation and the product team.
• Defining the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for different use cases/scenarios of solutions.
• Translate product vision into specific deliverables and ensure rigor in execution and attention to detail by effectively managing the product feature backlog.
• Support iterative customer testing and ongoing improvement of the client experience.
• Looking for opportunities to innovate within their scope of work to ensure that proposed solutions can compete in the market.
• Ensuring that platforms/features which are available to customers are performing as defined in the relevant SLAs and non-functional requirements.
• Clearly articulating and communicating platform/feature roadmap to stakeholders.
• Identifying, creating, and communicating business benefits and tracking and reporting on progress.
• Identify and partner on process improvements to enhance Old Mutual end-to-end Customer experience.
• Active involvement in team and program meetings, feature writing (if required), Product Increments (PI) planning, all team sessions, including daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, sprint retrospectives, sprint planning and backlog refinement, Product Owner syncs, and Program syncs on the program level (if required).

Commercial Impact

• Direct conversion rate optimisation efforts that contribute the achievement of digital sales targets.
• Champion the development and execution of Personalisation strategies in line with POPI act and Old Mutual’s data governance framework and policies.
• Lead eCommerce web security Best Practice, standards, and norms.
• Build a culture rooted in testing methodologies i.e., multi-variant, A/B testing and other performance measures.
• Design and develop new web pages that support and enable marketing activities.
• Manage web content strategies guaranteeing quality assurance programs in all content and deployment.
• Demonstrate a solid understanding of UX/UI and SEO principles, functionality, and design.

Operational Delivery

• Outline the vision for future use-cases to ensure leverage and scalability across unique client journeys.
• Focus on business impact and come up with actionable recommendations informed by solid data analysis and metrics.
• Live the continuous delivery values and principles by leading phases such as discovery session, inception workshops, planning, retrospectives, estimation sessions, and daily stand-up, tracking progress among others.
• Responsible for execution; backlog refinement, defining iteration content, story elaboration, accepting stories into the baseline, coordinating the release, preparation and participation iteration planning.

Management Effectiveness

• Contributes to communication and change management within line structures.
• Understanding and be actively involved in removing impediments to team performance that are raised by either the Scrum Master or team.
• Motivates the product/feature teams to leverage individual strengths to overcome challenges.
• Drives operational excellence through area of supervision.
• Selects potential managers to sustain pipeline.

Personal Effectiveness

• Contributes to a high performance culture in the Digital, Data and Analytics team
• Disciplined execution of Digital Services
• Effectively cost management
• Technical prowess and creative thinking
• Live OM values

Requirements:

• Matric with a relevant Tertiary qualification
• Willingness to travel throughout Africa
• 5 - 8 years’ experience in a Digital/sales & self-service environment.
• Minimum of 5 years demonstrated, relevant experience in a large, complex organization preferably in the financial services industry.
• A postgraduate qualification is advantageous.
• A Usability certification e.g. certified Usability Analyst (CUA) is advantageous.
• Proven experience with several agile development methodologies, frameworks and concepts, including Kanban, Scrum, continuous delivery.
• Knowledge in Systems thinking is advantageous.
• Experience with customer journeys, demonstrated ability to synthesize data, and strong program/project management skills.
• Experience in defining and delivering successful products in the digital space is required.
• Good understanding of Design( User Experience), Content, and Digital Marketing best practices.
• Experience working in a collaborative multi-disciplinary team within an interactive process and/or an Agile development methodology.
• Self-starter with outstanding organizational skills and ability to track multiple dependencies (3-5) going on all at once.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment, comfort in a dynamic and fast-moving work environment.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills; ability to communicate complex messages in simple language for better buy-in and tell a compelling story.
• Ability to build relationships and partner cross-functionally, cross-enterprise and manage stakeholders at different levels.