Product Owner Permanent

Working for a leading business in the Bristol region, my client is looking to appoint a Product Owner due to an upturn in their portfolio and product offerings.

The Product Owner role provides vision, co-ordination and commercial focus to their development efforts. Ultimately, the role is accountable for ensuring the products and services evolve in line with business demand.

This is a key role within the Business Systems team. Working alongside Infrastructure, Finance Systems and Service Operations, Business Systems defines and delivers enterprise IT services, from the software used by their customers through to data warehousing and analytics. As such, the team covers a mix of development (Visual Studio, Power Platform, SQL) and governance (project management, business analyst, product owner) skillsets.

Duties will include:

Working closely with demand generating business units, the Product Owner is accountable for representing their requirements in IT’s delivery plan. The Product Owner ensures that, with the support of Business Analysts, ideas appropriately translate into planned work is well structured, technically viable, appropriately prioritised and delivered in a way that aligns with our over-arching technical strategy.

Within IT, the Product Owner manages the delivery relationship between the business and the supplier, whether their in-house team or a third party. Ultimately, the Product Owner is accountable to the Project Owner and Project Sponsor for ensuring committed product enhancements are delivered as planned.

This role is not specifically aligned to the strict definition of Product Owner within the Agile methodology. Instead, it is a Product Owner in the more general sense and not tied to a particular project model.

Experience will include:

• Experienced in translating business requirements into functional and non-functional specifications for change (or statements of work) and delivering these through third parties.
• Confident in developing and maintaining roadmaps of change, align not just to today’s needs but also to the strategic vision
• Technically conversant, able to think logically to define system architecture and to challenge subject matter experts. The role holder will be expected to work with developers, DBA, architect and similar communities (both internal and external) in their day-to-day work.
• Thinks strategically, keeping abreast of the market and technology trends to ensure technology stack and associated processes always remain best-in-class.
• Managing system roadmaps by (1) ensuring that suppliers take account of future requirements in their planning and (2) championing opportunities presented by the supplier’s own strategy.