Product Owner

Job content

Job Title: Product Owner - Vehicle Lifecycle Management!

Location: Hybrid - home working with visits to BCA Hook fortnightly

Salary: Up to £60,000 + £5,000 car allowance + 10% bonus + benefits

Hours: 40 hours per week Monday – Friday

Automotive is an increasingly data-driven industry; our multiple touch points across the life of a vehicle supported by considerable investment in data quality, data warehousing and analysis, give BCA and our customers a genuine advantage in everything from smart transport solutions to transactional margins. Through acquisition, simplification and innovation BCA aims to drive accelerated growth. Over the last 4 years the management team have built the leading change of life business in the UK. The strategy is to build upon these strengths and to broaden our horizons into in-life automotive services.

BCA’s Group IT function is based in Hook and provides a group-wide shared service, including the delivery of IT projects and digital products. The Product Owner role may require some travel within the UK, across BCA’s different locations.

Over the last 5 years BCA has expanded its product portfolio to support all parts of the automotive value chain, delivering digital products to Dealers, Buyers, OEMs, End Customers, Transportation etc., across both the UK and Europe. We now require a motivated Product Owner to lead the development of the next generation of our suite of services enabling our partners to manage and dispose of their vehicles at the end of the lease.

The Role

Reporting into the Head of Product – Vehicle Lifecycle Management, the role will serve as the day to day technology leader for BCA’s suite of offerings to manage and dispose of vehicles at the end of their lease providing both external and internal facing stakeholders.

Collaborating closely with our commercial and operations teams the Product Owner leads the product development team to execute against our strategy, and deliver the right commercial outcomes and customer benefits.

As a Product Owner you will be involved in every aspect of the product development process, from brainstorming the next product innovation to working directly with our product design team and engineers to implement new features & iterate upon feedback. You will use your start-up mind-set and your full range of product development skills to produce elegantly simple features that align to both business & product outcomes. You’ll be expected to push the boundaries of what’s possible, while sharing in our healthy obsession for product, quality and attention to detail.

This role works closely with the wider Product Owner community and the Head of Product – VLM (Vehicle Lifecycle Management) to define and manage the product roadmap and ensure that products and features released are done so securely, robustly and methodically.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy

• Own the end to end strategy of the partner Inventory Management Service (IMS), and the restricted access sales platforms (known as PEEP and WSP).
• Manage products through their entire lifecycle, from leading on new innovations through to the deprecation of older more mature products ensuring while ensuring our partners continuation of service is maintained.
• Build business cases supporting the proposed solutions to deprecation and replacement.
• Ability to incorporate data, research and market analysis to inform product strategies and roadmaps.
• Support commercial opportunities by leading on the product propositions that meet commercial and partner objectives through RFI, RFP and / or tender processes
• Understand BCA’s strategic and competitive position and deliver products that are aligned with our mission and recognized as best in class in the automotive industry.
• Become the driver towards the reduction in complexity & duplication of services.
• Work with Commercial and Operations counterparts on the Strategic Direction for our digital products and its integration to the wider BCA ecosystem.
• Determine opportunities to drive innovation into the current product portfolio and add product features that add value to customers.
• Be the voice of the customer; ensuring that new products and commercially led programmes have the customer at the heart of them.
• Leading key interactions with the business community and users - ensuring we constantly listen to our internal and external customers and drive value into our products.

Product Development and Delivery

• A passion for building the right thing & building it right!
• Drive the best user experience through our digital platforms, to ensure an efficient and frictionless experience.
• Break down your deliverables into smaller chunks and iterate through delivery, releasing value early and often
• Understanding of prioritisation techniques to ensure we are building the right thing, at the right time
• Work closely with team and Technical lead to quarterly planning and coordinate across dependent products working to agreed outcomes/OKR’s
• Guide the team to optimise for outcome hypotheses, for experiments, for feedback, for speed and for learning.
• Well versed in writing user stories and acceptance criteria & Kanban methodologies
• Work in close partnership with our ways of working coach to improve team efficiencies
• Monitor and measure the success of the features and product performance
• Work closely with Commercial and Sales on go-to-market plans/communication to the market particularly the lease market, as well as OEM’s.
• Encourage a Build Measure Learn mind-set, creating a culture of innovation and continuous improvement within the product team
• Support the successful preparation and implementation of the product quarterly planning.
• Ensure the products and features are delivered to the required quality; minimising any disruption to business activities.

Staff and Leadership Development

• Build a great team environment in partnership with engineers and other cross-functional colleagues such as Product Design to implement and build new features that meet our standards of simplicity and quality
• Work to creatively improve the product through leading an inspired product team, extolling innovation, new ways of thinking and customer centric behaviours.

Requirements

• Hands-on Product Owner/Product Manager, who has led Agile product teams to deliver end-to-end products and propositions.
• Strategic thinker with an entrepreneur mind-set.
• Relationship skills - ability to develop and sustain positive and co-operative working relationships with a broad variety of company and partner personnel.
• Excellent team player, able to interact cross-functionally at different levels within the organisation
• Able to handle a high degree of complexity.
• A tenacious approach with the focus and determination to get things done effectively, looking for solutions to overcome difficulties.
• Highly motivated self-starter with a “can do” attitude.
• Strong written and oral communication skills with the ability to present complex data and arguments in clear and compelling manner.
• Strong negotiating & influencing skills with the ability to influence decision makers up to senior management level.
• Agile approach and ability to keep up with the pace of change, learn fast and adapt to the new conditions quickly and effectively.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to make decisions in the face of incomplete information.
• Explorer’s mind - curiosity, strong desire to innovate, take risks and think outside the box.
• Is comfortable operating in an organisation going through transformational change and leading change
• Being detail oriented and having the ability to work at both strategic and detailed levels
• Strong commercial acumen; understands the key financial drivers and dynamics related to growth and revenue goals
• High level of personal ownership and unimpeachable business integrity
• Desirable agile software development tools such as Microsoft Azure DevOps, and an understanding of Agile Frameworks.

Experience

• Significant relevant experience within a product led environment.
• Educated to a degree, or similar work experience.
• Experience working directly with commercial owners, and have a strong commercial focus
• Deep understanding of software development processes and cycles
• Knowledge and experience of Agile product development frameworks
• Good understanding of operating products in the cloud, and or migrating products to the cloud
• Extensive experience working directly with customer and external stakeholders
• Significant, demonstrable repeat experience of delivering successful products
• Cultural awareness and emotional intelligence, backed by demonstrable experience working closely with diverse cultures
• Ability to perform under pressure and in highly complex environments.
• Demonstrate a thorough working knowledge of the automotive sector is desirable
• A knowledge of design thinking and lean start-up working practices preferred.

Our policy is to employ the best qualified people and provide equal opportunity for the advancement of employees including promotion and training and not to discriminate against any person because of gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, belief or disability.