Product Owner

A vacancy exists for a Product Owner within the Micro Merchant Division – Touchsides, in Rosebank, Gauteng.  

The Product Owner will be the voice of the client, customer, and consumer, contributing to the Product Vision and Strategy, to meet their needs. The Product Owner will support the Product Office in maintaining and prioritizing the requirements funnel, providing the DevOps and Data team with the information on what needs to be delivered and in which order. The Product Owner supports the Global Product Office in translating product needs and requirements into deliverable units of work—Epics/Features/Stories, based on value, the agreed roadmap or the customer’s pain points.

Key Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Product Development Lifecycle

• Requirements funnel management – assess value, develop use cases, and prioritise user stories, epics, and themes to ensure work focuses on those with a maximum value that are aligned with product vision and strategy.
• Provide discipline, rigour and technical skills to the requirements definition and validation process.
• Facilitate, gather, define, and prioritise requirements with key stakeholders.
• Translate customers’ and clients’ needs into product backlogs, user stories, detailed business requirement documents and use cases.
• Convert roadmap features into user stories and complete the business requirements with acceptance criteria.
• Work ahead of the team to elicit requirements for the next sprint’s user stories.
• Work with DevOps and Data Scrum Managers to size the effort required to implement features.
• Sprint scheduling – work with DevOps and Data Scrum Managers to schedule features for development in sprints (1-5 sprints in advance).
• Work with DevOps and Data teams to design the required solution, document business requirements and acceptance criteria in the form of user stories, assess the complexity of these and translate them into implementable solutions and configurations.
• Contribute to product release management and testing (quality assurance) of the implemented solution to ensure it is in line with the initial request.
• Assist with testing of new functionality and troubleshooting of bugs raised during testing.
• Contribute subject matter knowledge and expertise to the development of training material.

Product Analytics

• Use internal tools to monitor product performance.
• Analyse process issues and bottlenecks and suggest improvements.
• Perform data discovery, analysis and modeling for the Product Office to make data-driven decisions.

Other

• Ad hoc feature lifecycle management – for specific requirements, manage the feature lifecycle from concept to implementation.
• Compile and deliver management reports as required.

Conduct Market and User Research

• Gather and analyse data for potential business expansion.
• Identify specific business opportunities.
• Follow competitors and the industry, pinpointing opportunities for differentiation.
• Test business processes and recommend improvements.
• Research customer pain points and needs via trade visits and customer interviews.
• Apply standard methods in support of user research initiatives to find opportunities for innovation. Document and share the outcomes of user research.
• Develop and maintain reporting tools.

NPS Tool Management

• Prepare and launch NPS surveys making use of CustomerGauge.
• Responsible for the management of the NPS tool vendor.
• Prepare the NPS performance report by collecting, analyzing, and summarizing data, and publishing the NPS score.
• Coordinate with relevant departments for the closure of key concern points captured in the customer feedback.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Influence stakeholders to support business projects.
• Assist with project management for selected projects.
• Engage stakeholders to ensure the Product Office is receiving necessary inputs.
• Work directly with internal stakeholders, including senior staff and managers, to ensure successful translation of requirements into high-quality product deliverables.

In order to be considered for this position, the following requirements must be met:

• Master of Bachelor’s degree preferably IT.
• Scrum Product Owner certification will be an advantage.
• 5 – 8 years’ experience in an e-commerce product environment, customer-focused technology on the edge of business and IT, coupled with leading teams.
• Functional skills: experience with IT systems, relevant to platforms, knowledge of industry trends.

Technical Competencies:

• Computer literacy – MS Office Suite.