Senior Specialist: Product Owner at Absa Group Limited (Absa)

Job Summary

• Implement and lead on delivery of strategic products to ensuring that business stays on leading edge of technology, contributing across the technology stack, from database and develops infrastructure that supports continuous deployment, to native apps.
• A strategic  role designed to ensure delivery and implementation of business goals and objectives, in practical and functional terms. Functions as interpreter and bridge by facilitating between the business and technical teams who are building, delivering and maintaining a product. Ensures that the voice of the customer is represented to the technical teams by clearly articulating and communicating their needs, and that the voice of the technical team is represented back to the business when relaying constraints, blockers and opportunities, in terms they can understand.

Job Description

Product Owner

• A strategic role designed to ensure delivery and implementation of business goals and objectives, in practical and functional terms. Functions as interpreter and bridge by facilitating between the business and technical teams who are building, delivering and maintaining a product. Ensures that the voice of the customer is represented to the technical teams by clearly articulating and communicating their needs, and that the voice of the technical team is represented back to the business when relaying constraints, blockers and opportunities, in terms they can understand.
• Generates ideas and strategies that bring the business closer to its goals and needs, in the places where it matters, by identifying the true goals to be achieved and problems to be solved – and transforming these into real requirements and options, and guiding stakeholders through what decisions to make during this process. Entrepreneurial mindset that thrives in breaking down the business objectives into work items and distilling everything into a planned roadmap. Knows how to take overall business vision and turn it into a fully realized product that clients and customers will want to use.
• Functions as a passionate, hands-on ambassador and is the voice of the product – its history and ideation, purpose, and goals, and short or long-term future. Can share knowledge, answer questions, and assist customers making use of it or wishing to onboard into it.
• This is an active role, requiring a proactive working style and ability to problem solve with what you have at hand, while still understanding appropriate business guardrails and knowing who to approach for decision-making, ideation evaluation or approval, and innovation processes. As a Product Owner, you are accountable for the actual value delivered back to the business, while functioning as a responsible and involved custodian for business objectives.

Responsibilities:

• Lead (directly or indirectly) a team of engineers and/or software developers and define product goals and vision in clear and concrete terms (e.g. by way of requirements, well defined stories and an overall roadmap).
•  Work with all stakeholders to fully understand needs and objectives and distil these into smaller work items that form a working backlog for the team to draw from.
• Liaise with and coordinating all parties to create and align around a working definition of success for the product, upfront (e.g. metrics, outputs, frameworks, UI – a complete end-to-end for what a successful product looks like for the end customer making use of it). Align this definition to business value or ROI, as defined by stakeholders who have briefed the product.
• Communicate product goals clearly to all interested parties.
• Assess and/or set standards and metrics for product success, quality, efficiency and/or performance. Track against these routinely and highlight milestone achievements.
• Work and collaborate with technical team members to map out the work items and understand estimated timelines, dependencies, risks, trade-offs and alternatives (where needed). Ensure business stakeholders participate in decisions around trade-offs, if necessary.
• Regularly communicate back to the business and stakeholders on the progress of work items, any blockers or issues, raising risks, proposing solutions and ideas to unblock when necessary.
• Publishing and communicating release and go-live dates for products, features, updates or fixes, along with coordinating communications.
• Creation and management of a product backlog, roadmap and any artefacts needed for a viable and realistic plan the team can execute on.
• Aligning scope and requirements to budget, time or available resource capacity, and managing expectations with regard to these.
• Seek out and interpret customer feedback, assess user behaviour and suggest ideas or changes from these.
• Monitor ongoing product or feature performance with a view to continuous improvement.
• Create documentation, as and when needed, to facilitate understanding of requirements for future work, document as-is workflows or processes and keep everyone aligned.
• Identifying process and way-of-work improvements and working with team members to gain efficiencies.
•  Providing ongoing operational support for existing data products and solutions, including communicating about crisis or support-related issues that require immediate action.

Skills

• Working knowledge of various delivery methodologies, especially Agile principles and practices, and ability to apply them in the environment and context at hand.
• Stakeholder and expectation management.
• Ability to run, manage and control working sessions with key parties and identifying next steps or generating outcomes (e.g. planning).
•  Synthesizing outcomes for the product(s) based on business need, value, goals and ROI.
• Ability to identify risks, dependencies, constraints or blockers – and suggest alternatives, if/when needed.
• Requirements gathering and planning.
• Excellent time management and prioritization skills.
• Understanding of release management, ability to apply contextually.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Solid working knowledge of success and product metrics (know how to formulate the right metrics for the task at hand, or apply existing ones to measure product success).
• Research (product, market, competitor analysis, domain, etc.)
• Understanding of data and statistics.
• Business analysis skills.
• Understanding of architecture principles.

Competencies (soft skills)

• Communication and presentation abilities.
• Analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Critical thinking abilities.
• Collaborative approach to working with team and stakeholders, ability to reach consensus.
• Strong leadership skills, and able to apply these irrespective of reporting lines.
• Key decision-making skills (knowing how to find the information you need to make a decision, and when to make it).
• Building and cultivating key relationships.
• Commercial acumen/mindset (quantify benefits, operational efficiencies, profit and loss etc.)

Experience and qualifications

• Approximately 8-10 years of experience, primarily as a Product Owner.
• Tertiary qualification in relevant fields, and any additional relevant qualifications (e.g. CSPO).
• Experience in Agile and Scrum methodologies preferred.
• Track record of successfully delivering products or features, and experience in developing products.

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences (Required)