Product Owner at Valenture Institute

Summary:

The Product Owner leads collaboration, facilitates sprint activities, and creates and communicates requirements that translate business needs into working software. Through a combination of strong business understanding, solid analytical and problem- solving skills, and facilitation techniques, the Technical Product Owner will take the lead in translating business needs into solutions and features. This role reports directly to the Head of Technology, working closely with business stakeholders to understand, analyze, refine and prioritise business requirements, ensuring that business objectives are fully understood to maximize the value of the work of the Development Team. Working in an agile environment to innovate, craft, and drive intuitive features and solutions from concept to completion, to engage and delight our customers and enhance the user experience of Valentures internal technology stack. 

Key Responsibilities:

• Be the primary link between business stakeholders and the software development team, ensuring business objectives are translated into high quality, working software.
• Define, prioritize, and drive the realization of specific product vision. Act as the subject-matter expert for assigned products.
• Be the point person on the product development team, using high-level perspective to define goals and create a vision for development projects.
• Collaborate with business managers and stakeholders to make sure the goals are clear and the vision is aligned with business objectives, including Operations and Project Management.
• Make sure that there is buy-in from stakeholders on all major decisions and strategy and clear instructions and deliverables for the developers, communicating with stakeholders across the board, including customers, 
• Collaborate with a cross-functional team of designers, developers, testers to develop and execute against Product Roadmaps and Release Plans.
• Create, prioritize, maintain and own the Product Backlog based on the overall strategy and business objectives, including the definition of epics, user stories, acceptance criteria. 
• Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and prioritize business needs.
• Map out project dependencies to inform the necessary sequence of development.
• Continuously and transparently communicate with internal stakeholders the prioritization of the Product Backlog and the status of development efforts via Product Demos, Release Plans and other means. 
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next. Make the list accessible and available to all stakeholders (particularly developers) to ensure optimized performance and project outcomes.
• Work closely with the Software Development team to direct, motivate, and guide them to delivery.
• Optimizing the value of the work the Development Team performs, overseeing the actual development of the product and being a key player throughout each event, including planning, refinement, review, and sprint.
• Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed. Break down epic-level user stories into detail-level stories consumable and testable by a scrum team.
• Implement Quality Assurance processes, ensuring all deliverables are thoroughly tested and meet a high quality standard

Key Requirements:

• 4 years of professional experience
• Bachelor of Science degree or equivalent work experience
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Excellent communication and strong interpersonal skills
• Ability to present complex ideas simply
• Experience and knowledge of software development process
• Extensive understanding of the Agile development process and best practices
• Knowledge of the principles of product management

Skillset requirements:

• Self-starter who can come up to speed quickly on our applications, technologies and processes
• Confident presenter and a good written skills 
• Technical expertise and the ability to question, understand and challenge software implementation decisions and priorities
• Strong interpersonal and team building skills, ability to work with a diverse team and influence change across functional and business boundaries
• Strong project management, planning, and organization skills, including the ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously in a fast-paced environment
• Experience with scrum and other Agile development methodologies
• Bold and optimistic personality: Strong drive and high energy; action and the results oriented
• Solid technical background with an understanding of software development and platform technologies