Overview

Position Title: Senior Product Owner

Company: Transport for London

Location: Farnborough, UK

Job Description:

As a Senior Product Owner you’ll be accountable for analysing, prioritising and translating complex business requirements into work packages that can be implemented by our Agile development teams. You’ll also be responsible for the creation and management of product backlogs, ensuring that stories you create have sufficient information to keep a development and test team running at maximum efficiency.

Responsibilities:

  • Be the product owner for assigned systems within Technology Development as per the principles of Agile software development – e.g. creating and maintaining the product backlog, defining the acceptance criteria, sequencing and prioritisation of stories, ensuring stories are appropriately scoped and that developers have the correct understanding of what is required to be built
  • Be the ambassador and subject matter expert for the product
  • Work with development team to prioritise the product backlog according to business needs, ensuring valuable releases
  • Coordinate with the delivery teams to avoid delivery conflicts in terms of integration and planned releases
  • Provide sponsors and stakeholders with visibility of product development progress
  • Effectively articulate product features and the needs of users and provide development teams with an accurate understanding of what needs to be delivered
  • Collaborate across Technology Development and the wider business to ensure Agile processes are continually reviewed and improvements implemented.

Requirements:

  • Thorough understanding of Scrum Agile and Kanban development principles
  • Detailed working knowledge of systems development and implementation
  • Experience in managing and mitigating system risks
  • Commercial awareness, ensuring systems development is aligned with contractual agreements
  • Strong knowledge of customer facing and internal infrastructure and technology trends, particularly those relating to public transport operations
  • A degree in a relevant technology/computer science subject/equivalent technical qualification is desirable
  • Familiarity with using ADO or Jira as an agile planning and tracking tool is desirable
  • Proven ability to analyse complex systems, draw conclusions and produce solutions
  • Proven ability to define and document functional and non-functional system specifications for large, complex systems
  • Proven ability to resolve Client-Contractor conflicts
  • Proven ability to build effective working relations (partnering) with people at all levels inside and outside the organisation
  • Proven ability to influence people at all levels, including negotiating and successfully facilitating joint decision-making
  • Skilled at multi-tasking and balancing a number of complex work activities including; requirements elicitation and management, interviewing skills, backlog refinement and estimation, prioritisation and acceptance management
  • Strong verbal communication skills including ability to talk through complex information in a way that non-technical stakeholders can assimilate, as well as being able to present business value descriptions of requirements to a highly technical developer audience
  • Strong written communication skills including ability to produce summary and feasibility reports on complex technical and business issues
  • Strong previous experience as a Product Owner role in an Agile development team
  • Experience with delivering a product in one of the TfL product categories specified
  • Successful experience in a dynamic environment, handling multiple tasks, ensuring quality on time and to budget
  • Experience or in-depth knowledge of an aspect of the public transport operating business (both operational and non-operational) desirable
  • Extensive experience and understanding of requirements elicitation, analysis, documentation, and validation
  • Proven track record in stakeholder engagement: enthusing people, maintaining trust and supporting groups to ensure continued participation over time
  • Strong experience of building relationships with, and influencing, a range of people at all levels within and outside the organisation

About Transport for London

Our main job is to keep the city moving, working and growing but to do that, we have to listen. Constant improvements across the network are fuelled by feedback and comments from customers, as well as work within communities, representative groups, businesses and other London transport stakeholders.