Role Purpose
The Product Owner III is a member of the agile team, responsible for defining user stories and prioritizing the team backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the features or components for the team. The role owns multiple products of varying to high complexities , impact and visibility products and engages and collaborates with product management to execute the product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
Role Description
- Takes the lead in the solution design of new features and works with business stakeholders to create the optimal user experience and assess the impact on the backend.
- Facilitates workshops and leads the requirements gathering process, including creating wireframes and engaging stakeholders for input and sign-off.
- Ensures UI alignment with wireframes and feature requirements, guiding designers and actively participating in demo sessions to substantiate design decisions based on backend knowledge.
- Documents the impact of the user experience on data models, business logic and microservices in detail, including context diagrams, system/data flows, and high-level system integration requirements.
- Review integration and architecture specifications and provides input to ensure they address all requirements.
- Acts as a subject matter expert and guides product development, coaching and supporting junior and senior product owners in their development.
- Provide input into the refinement of the program backlog, ensuring the team is familiar with the features being brought into PI planning, collaborating with program management in the refinement of the backlog and keeping them informed of progress in achieving team PI objectives.
- Continuously refine and sequence the product backlog:
- Gather the requirements for the product and capture them in the form of a product backlog, consisting of user stories with acceptance criteria.
- Ensure all user stories are written and that each user story has acceptance criteria.
- Provide visible, transparent, and clear direction, ensuring the development team is clear on priorities.
- Provide clear solution direction to the agile team (or multiple agile teams).
- Apply economic decision making.
- Sequence user stories based on team PI objectives.
- Balance PI objectives with local team requirements.
- Ensure team backlog readiness for next iteration.
- Include the team in backlog refinement.
- Participate in ART level events: ART sync, Product Owner Scrum of Scrums, Inspect and Adapt, PI Planning, daily stand-ups, and system demos.
- Help create a release plan and track progress towards the release of a product.
- Drive mobile digital omnichannel customer engagement based on customer preference and omnichannel strategies.
- Ensure a consistent and delightful customer experience across all digital touchpoints of the Shoprite customer journey. Customers being any end-user i.e. consumers, operational users, etc.
- Provide strategic input to customer experience improvements that help drive customer acquisition, customer retention, and conversion.
- Test new features in the staging environment (user acceptance testing) in collaboration with business stakeholders, to provide business sign-off on the feature.
- Actively promote and advocate product features and customer-first product design incl. high levels of customer empathy.
- Adhere to and improve customer service levels across businesses and service.
- Provide integrated reporting and feedback.
- Engage at a senior level with respect to customer centric product concepts and best practices.
- Serve as a lead subject matter expert to guide product development.
- Coach and support junior and mid-level product owners in their development.
Qualifications and General Experience
- Degree in Business, IT, Engineering, Marketing, or another relevant field – (essential).
- Certified Product Owner / certified SAFe Product Owner – (essential).
- +6 years’ experience in a Lead or Senior Product Owner role, with experience working in an agile team and proven success launching new and complex product features and translating business strategy and analysis into successful consumer products – (essential).
- Extensive experience collaborating across multi-disciplinary teams to deliver complex projects – (essential).
- In-depth understanding and experience with analytics and big data – (essential).
- Strong commercial experience in digital led business development environments – (essential).
- Extensive customer user and loyalty experience – (essential).
- Solid knowledge of legal compliance (POPIA, Electronic Information Act, etc.) – (essential).
- General marketing or retail experience – (essential).
- Ecommerce experience – (essential).
- Exposure to the African digital market and customers – (desired).
Specific Experience: Payments and POS
- Previous experience implementing payment solutions within B2C Ecommerce (online card payments, wallet payments, loyalty programmes, instant EFT, gift cards, vouchers, etc.).
- Understanding of the latest trends in payment technology and opportunities available to make online payments more seamless for Ecommerce customers.
- Previous experience troubleshooting payment issues and working with business partners and developers to implement innovative solutions and robust business logic.
- Understanding of payment reconciliations at a high level, to enable the development of functionality to improve reconciliations between multiple data sources.
- Basic understanding of point-of-sale systems and how to interface an online sale and tender (payment) types into POS files for downstream consumption and financial reporting/reconciliation.
- Comfortable with high level of ambiguity when designing payment and POS solutions.
- Independent, motivated self-starter with a focus and determination to persevere in a challenging, fast paced environment to achieve high-quality results.
- Excellent problem-solver and analytical thinker with the ability to focus on what is most important, balance technical constraints, maximise product value and deliver a differentiated product. Considers new solutions to increase product value while verifying the business value delivered by the product and how it aligns with the strategy.
- Excellent product focus and expertise with end-to-end product optimisation – Translates market and customer feedback into strategic requirements, driving product delivery through an agile release process while leading execution across development and product management. Brings top-quality expertise to manage product requirements, deliver product optimisation and introduce new tools and practices.
- Customer focused – Passionate about creating value for customers. Translates customer needs into meaningful experiences, taking a proactive approach to anticipating future customer needs.
- Business acumen – Understands company-wide KPI tree; understands company business models, goals and strategies and how they impact on commercial viability and profitability.
Key Competencies and Work Ethic
- Collaborative partner – Effectively leverages the collective intelligence of the team; reaches objectively good negotiation results while maintaining collaborative relationships. Models the company values.
- Stakeholder engagement skills – Anticipates and aligns stakeholder needs across business areas. Communicates and aligns the vision and strategy across product and technology teams; engages with stakeholders on the product development process and product management mindset.
- Leadership and influencing skills – Empower and inspires others to deliver their best; identifies conflicts or roadblocks quickly and resolves them independently; creates an atmosphere of enthusiasm and commitment; coaches and supports junior and mid-level product owners in their development.
- Communication skills – Strong communication and moderation skills; writes thought-leadership communications; comfortable preparing and giving presentations to large, senior audiences.
- Is curious and adaptable, finds agile and rapid ways of implementing innovative solutions fast. High degree of comfort with ongoing technological and organisational change.
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