Product Owner - Project Atlanta Contract Horsham, England
Job description
Overall Purpose of the Role:
As a Product Owner you will be responsible for defining and owning all stories across your scrum team. You will ensure each story meets its acceptance criteria and sign off delivered stories, to ensure delivery of high quality features which meet our business objectives while maintaining overall integrity of the product.
Each of our development teams has a dedicated Product Owner, and our teams work collectively across the planned features for our .NET applications, which provide back office and investment platforms to Independent Financial Advisers as well as the integrations with third party software. By working closely with our development teams, product managers and wider business stakeholders, you will ensure the timely and quality-driven delivery of software solutions for our innovative and industry-leading products.
You must understand the way the businesses we support operate and how the applications and solutions we build facilitate the growth of our clients’ businesses.
Key Activities & Responsibilities:
Preparation and Planning for PI Planning
Feature preparation: Write Feature Documentation in preparation for future product increments.
PI Planning: Lead the user story writing during PI planning, providing clarification to assist estimation and sequencing of stories.
Program backlog: Have a good awareness of the program backlog and assist with program backlog refinement during PO Syncs; actively learn other domains and applications within the group; be a knowledge sharer.
Iteration Execution
Maintain the feature backlog: Build, edit and maintain the backlog for the features you are assigned; make priorities calls during sprints to ensure your team meets its sprint goals; coordinate any dependencies with other POs and Scrum Masters; ensure there is approximately two sprints worth of stories ready in the backlog at all times.
Sprint Planning/Refinement: Lead user story writing sessions with the agile team, ensuring there is a shared understanding of the business problem being solved; write acceptance criteria for user stories – own the detail; accept the final iteration plan.
Adopt BDD/TDD principles: Endeavour to specify all requirements using realistic examples (specification by example); use gherkin GIVEN, WHEN, THEN syntax for acceptance criteria whenever possible.
Accept stories: You are the only team member who can accept stories as done. Validate stories meet the acceptance criteria, ensuring quality and fitness for use.
Understand enabler work: Have an awareness of technical concerns impacting the features you are assigned, assisting with sequencing of enabler stories.
Team and PI ceremonies: Attend all team level ceremonies, PO syncs and system demos; be prepared to demo your sprint iterations to senior stakeholders in the system demo.
Qualifications & Skills
- Minimum 2 years’ experience as a Product Owner / BA.
- Professional qualifications (e.g. ISEB, Agile Practitioner).
- Deep understanding of financial services and particularly the financial advice sector.
- Excellent written and communication skills.
- Sharp analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Strong client facing skills, includes presentation and persuasion skills.
Personal Characteristics
- Highly motivated with a genuine interest in technology.
- Passion to deliver cutting edge and high-quality products.
- Ability to work autonomously as well as part of a team.
- Ability to use initiative.
- Self-driven workload.
We recognise potential, whoever you are
Our purpose is to provide excellent investment performance to clients through active management. Diversity of thought facilitated by an inclusive culture will allow us to make better decisions and better achieve our purpose. This is why inclusion and diversity are a strategic priority for us and why we are an equal opportunities employer: you are welcome here regardless of your age, disability, gender identity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, socio-economic background or any other protected characteristics
