Product Owner

The Opportunity

Travel Counsellors has commenced an exciting change agenda and we are recruiting for an experienced Product Owner to join the Technology function. This critical role will work collaboratively with stakeholders from across the group, to gather feature requests, schedule releases and coordinate sprints. You should be able to identify user needs, help a customer, understand business value and work with cross-functional teams to manage product releases.

As Product Owner, you will be the professional responsible for setting, prioritising, and accepting the work generated by a team in order to ensure the most valuable and proper functionality of the product. Your effort is important for the company as you will need to deliver product not just according to users, but the product that helps make our company vision a reality.

This role will help the business to evolve and adapt in a managed way, by ensuring all major changes and developments are considered as part of its strategy. Working directly with tech and non-tech stakeholders and senior management teams you will need to ensure information is captured, organised, analysed and conveyed in a simple, yet accurate manner

Culture fit is extremely important, and we are seeking a caring, entrepreneurial, pragmatic, hands on Product Owner who is able to work with others to define product visions and roadmaps for our core proprietary platform, Phenix.

• Serve as the voice of the customer
• Work with internal and external customers to analyse the needs and align product roadmap to strategic goals.
• Owns the product roadmap
• Develop scope and define backlog items (epic/features/user stories) that guide the Agile software development team.
• Solve product related problems, make decisions, complete trade-off analysis to stay on track towards business deliverable commitments.
• Draft key objectives and results, strategies and apply the data for the product to make business decisions.
• Possess a fundamental understanding of end-to-end customer experience integration and dependencies.
• Collaborate with stakeholders during the visioning and concept development of a product.
• Accountable for the created product(s), delivering the product model and communicating the product needs with business partners.
• Asses value, develop cases, and prioritise stories, epics and themes to ensure work focuses on those with a maximum value that are aligned with product strategy.
• Develop and maintain an appropriately prioritised backlog of user stories for implementation.
• Act as an ambassador for the product and as the primary contact for queries related to the product.
• Develop appropriately detailed specifications for the product features so they are clearly understood by the development teams.
• Represent team in front of stakeholders, external partners or end users – our Travel Counsellors
• Work closely with product management and senior management in order to create a product that fits the company portfolio.
• Research and analyse market, the users, and the roadmap for the product
• Follow our competitors and the industry
• Increase an understanding of Agile practices, Lean Start-up, new technologies opportunities and other new trends.

Key Skills & Experiences Required

• 3+ years of proven experience operating as a product owner in a similar environment
• Strong understanding of technologies used to build and deploy software products
• Strong knowledge of Agile principles and process
• Experience of SAFe
• Demonstrable track record of developing products within deadlines
• Excellent attention to detail
• Sharp analytical and problem-solving skills
• Creative and innovative thinker
• Experience with a definition of minimum marketable features and minimum viable products.
• Experience in managing, mentoring or leading others in a small team environment
• Comfortable in presenting complex data and information to non-technical audiences
• Customer centric- putting the customer at the heart of everything you do
• Able to work under pressure, in an often-impatient environment
• Excellent technical, analytical, and project management skills

Desirable Attributes

• Experience of the travel industry
• SAFe or other product related certifications