Product Owner
Location: Warwick 2-3 days on site
Duration: 6 months initially
The Product Owner (PO) is the Agile team member primarily responsible for maximising the value delivered by the team by ensuring that the team backlog is aligned with customer and stakeholder needs.
As a member of the extended Product Management function, the PO is the team's primary customer advocate and primary link to business and technology strategy. This enables the team to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders while continuously evolving the Solution.
Key Responsibilities
Know the customer - Value is determined by the customer; therefore, the PO is keenly aware of the needs of the people to whom their products are delivered. Customers may be internal or external to the enterprise and may have direct or indirect relationships with the PO. Whether they consume products, services, systems, APIs, platforms, or other solutions, customers' wants, needs, and preferences are continually explored by the PO.
Know the stakeholders - Product design and implementation must also reflect the needs of non-customer stakeholders. Business Owners, Lean Portfolio Management, Product Management, System Architects, and fellow POs, for example, rely on the cadence and quality of the team's output. The PO identifies key stakeholders and balances their needs with those of the customer.
Identify the problem to be solved - Good products solve specific problems. What's more, they solve specific problems that are worth solving. Identifying problems that customers want to be solved is the first element of design thinking. In this context, the PO discovers a range of customer needs through divergent thinking tools, then identifies the 'jobs to be done' that are most worth pursuing.
Develop whole-product solutions - Solutions that address a range of customer needs are more valuable than those that target a single need. POs aim to deliver whole-product solutions by understanding the desired customer experience, guiding the development of candidate designs through the Lean UX process, and delivering tested concepts that maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Guide Own/Story creation - While any team member can write stories at any time, it is the PO's responsibility to ensure that they are well-formed and aligned with product strategy. The PO clarifies story details, applies user-story voice, ensures 'INVEST' characteristics are present, assists with story splitting, defines enablers, and incorporates behavior-driven development (BDD) to ensure stories support continuous value flow. The PO also allows space for 'local' stories and spikes that advance product design but are not derived explicitly from ART-level features.
Prioritise backlog items - Achieving continuous value flow requires that the highest-value backlog items are delivered in the shortest sustainable lead time and in the right sequence. The PO enables this by regularly ordering backlog items according to their cost of delay and communicating that sequence to the team during backlog refinement and Iteration Planning.
Accept Stories - The PO works with the team to agree on accepted story completion. This includes validating that the story meets acceptance criteria, that it has the appropriate, persistent acceptance tests, and that it otherwise complies with its Definition of Done (DoD). In so doing, the PO assures that quality is built in.
Support Architectural Runway - POs do not typically drive technological decisions, but they make space in the backlog to support the implementation of Architectural Runway. They collaborate with System Architects to craft enablers and work with stakeholders to establish appropriate capacity allocations.
Balance stakeholder perspectives - POs constantly receive input, feedback, and insights from customers, stakeholders, teams, and tools that can impact solution development. This information can validate, invalidate, or challenge implementation decisions unexpectedly. Moreover, these sources often conflict with one another. POs balance these perspectives by understanding the needs that drive them, remaining customer-centric, respecting capacity allocations, evaluating the cost of delay, and collaborating with stakeholders and teams to make implementation decisions that produce the most favorable outcomes.
Elaborate Stories - Stories are typically created before iteration execution but require ongoing elaboration. POs facilitate frequent conversations with their teams to resolve questions, manage dependencies, and communicate priorities that emerge as stories are implemented. This information also helps the team slice stories effectively to achieve increased velocity and shortened learning cycles.
Foster Built-In Quality - As the primary proxy for customers and stakeholders on the team, the PO plays a pivotal role in evaluating the value delivered from the backlog. The PO regularly evaluates progress toward story acceptance criteria, including compliance with Built-In Quality criteria, such as the scalable definition of done, and nonfunctional requirements (NFRs). The PO works closely with the team to detect quality issues as they are introduced and correct them in or near real-time.
Participate in team and ART events - As a member of the Agile team, the PO, naturally, attends and actively participates in team events during PI execution. During iteration planning, backlog refinement, iteration reviews, team retrospectives, and team syncs, the PO provides crucial feedback on the team's work from an outside-in, customer-centric point of view. By participating in PO Sync and System Demos, the PO helps the team satisfy dependencies, demonstrate incremental value, and maintain cadence with the ART.
Test benefit hypotheses - Value can only be realized when a working solution is in the hands of the customer. Even then, it is not guaranteed. During development, therefore, value can only be speculated. To mitigate the risk of delivering solutions with little value, the PO collaborates with Product Management to define benefit hypotheses based on extensive customer and market knowledge. These hypotheses drive implementation and are validated (or invalidated) by feedback the PO gathers from customers and stakeholders throughout the product life cycle.
Obtain feedback from customers and stakeholders - Customers derive value by using delivered solutions. Their feedback indicates how well solutions meet their needs, which drives solution adoption and loyalty. Stakeholders derive value from revenue, cost savings, or decreased risk stemming from customers' use of delivered solutions. The PO gathers this feedback directly via empathy interviews, Gemba walks, iteration reviews, and system demos and indirectly via application telemetry, usage analytics, financial reporting, and secondary market data.
Share feedback with the ART - Because solution delivery requires coordination and synchronization across the value stream, the feedback collected by the PO is valuable to the whole ART. The PO shares this information with Product Management and System Architects as part of Continuous Exploration, with other POs during PO Sync, with their teams during backlog refinement, iteration planning, and iteration reviews, and with the ART during PI planning, system demos and, if applicable, Inspect and Adapt events.
Evolve solution design - Frequent, customer-centric feedback cycles fuel the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle that enables continuous value delivery and the ongoing, relentless improvement of the value stream itself. By gathering and sharing these critical insights, the PO enables the continuous refinement of the product vision, roadmap, strategy, and design toward optimum business value.
Key Skills
Sound Product Owner experience working within Digital.
Experience in leading product development.
Excellent delivery focus - Ensure we deliver a quality product to market.
Ability to anticipate business and strategic evolution.
Attention to detail.
Experience in best practice digital techniques including a broad understanding of digital CX best practice.
SAFe Trained/Certified
excellent written and verbal communication skills
Quick learner, takes ownership and is not afraid to ask question
