Product Owner (Cape Town, South Africa)

Product Owner (Cape Town, South Africa)

Our client is a renowned Financial Services firm in South Africa, they are seeking a Product Owner to work with their Program Management team.

Role Purpose

the Product Owner role supports the assigned business areas and will work closely with the
corresponding development team in the Software Development workstream to solve the challenges identified in the business area through effective system changes.

Responsibilities

Collaborator
• Collaborates closely with the development team and various business stakeholders.
• Involved in the definition of Ready and Done with the team
• Collaborates with all business stakeholders to arrive at the vision, goals, priorities and business objectives
• Collaborates with BA’s on activities like story splitting, requirement clarification and making sure functional
and non-functional requirements are addressed
• Collaborates with other Product Owners on relevant dependencies and / or cross-functional feature sets

Vision, Goals and Measurement (collaborative process)
• Brings together and takes ownership of the product vision and ensures this is communicated into the team
• Customer journeys, business processes and their associated performance metrics
• Business objectives
• Identify product domain boundaries and grow relevant product domain knowledge
• Solution architecture, in-line with IT systems architecture goals
• Negotiates and takes ownership of product goals
• Measures the inherent and commercial value created by the product over time, especially after deployments.
• Ensure alignment between all business stakeholders and IT in vision and goals

Manages the Product backlog
• Calculates/understands the value and risk of items
• Prioritises the product backlog in order of value, risk or business importance in collaboration / consultation
with business owners / stakeholders and the scrum team
• Ensures the backlog is visible to all stakeholders
• Actively involved in product backlog refinement (With entire team and at times business)
• Actively creates clarity to the level required (based on context of the team) and leverages the team to create
clarity too
• Guides and ensures clarity at least 2 sprints ahead of time for the sprints
• Balances the conflicting needs of all stakeholders across the business product owners, IT and any other
stakeholders
• Negotiating change requests when required within the sprint

Planning and organizing

• Plan, organise and collaborate to ensure future requirements from other teams are in place for delivery of
dependent objectives / goals (While dependencies are a reality in our context)
• Provide input and assessment of the Project Portfolio Management function
• Create alignment between Product Owners
• Communicator with stakeholders across the business managing expectation and delivery timelines

In the team and in business
• Represents all business needs within the Scrum team. This requires a level of trust to be developed with
business and to be extended from business.
• Identifies overlaps between and across all business areas
• Brings the right stakeholders and expertise together as and when needed to collaborate with the team
• Business stakeholders still talk to the team, the PO and BA’s are involved and informed
• The PO is a full member of the Scrum team and should be available to the team. The PO may have a separate
reporting line. The PO also spends time in business to ensure that they are aligned and understand the
business direction and needs.
• Skilled communicator within the Scrum team, building strong relationships, good trust and accountability.
Able to have crucial conversations with the team.

Acceptance criteria and release pipeline
• Helps define acceptance criteria, ensuring that business is involved in this along with the team. This is helping
define the definition of ready and done.
• Accepts or rejects the work of the development team before declaring done. This involves bringing in business with UAT
• Calls for releases
• Is accountable along with the team for delivery on time and of quality

Decisions

• Builds trust with business to make decisions around the product.
• Works with business stakeholders at their need for level of detail and involvement
• Decisions are collaborative and the job of the PO is to bring the right people together to get finality on decisions

Qualifications

• Solid understanding of the product lifecycle
• In-depth understanding of Agile methodologies, understanding of products, and up-to-date on industry
standards and best practices
• Agile software development methodology and practices, especially Scrum
• Business domain knowledge
• Data manipulation and interpretation
• Good facilitation skills
• Relevant IT degree from recognized institution, or Diploma / Degree in Business Administration with extensive
work experience as a Product Owner
• 3 year Tertiary qualification majoring in Finance will be highly beneficial
• Certified Product Owner (CPO) – Highly beneficial
• Minimum 4 years’ experience as a Product Owner or Lead/Senior Business or Systems Analyst for a Financial
Systems Product and at least 6 years’ experience in a leadership role.
• Experience standing in for a Product Owner for a software development team that are diligently applying
Scrum principles, practices, and theory for a Financial Transaction System